Continuity Conundrums
Yesterday our task was to attempt a short film with continuity editing in mind. This means everything must flow seamlessly with no jumping to different locations. This is difficult in a non-professional environment for a number of reasons.
It also had to follow the 180 Degree rule and contain both a Match on Action and a Reverse shot.
The 180 degree rule is the rule whereby there is a perpendicular line running through the camera, and you cannot turn the camera round and face where it was previously shooting from. See diagram below. This is similar to the 4th Wall element where on a set, one of the walls is non-existent as the cameras film from this point.
One of which is the fact we were using an active school. Therefore there will have been activities in the background that we could not account for in our film. To get round this we chose a location that was for the most part surrounded by stationary objects, however it is difficult to exclude everything in the background.
Another issue we experienced was the weather. As we began shooting on a foggy November morning we had no control over how foggy it would stay, as shooting the footage is considerably more time consuming than the final product. 1 minute's worth of footage can be equivalent to 2 hours filming. This presented a problem whereby in the pace of weather and ambient lighting changes is disproportionate to our in-film timescale.
One issue we had on our film that was not related to continuity was a water droplet on the lens, we did not spot this until the editing stage (by which time the lighting and weather were too different for a re-shoot). This produced a distorted edge on 2 scenes breaking the continuity.
It also had to follow the 180 Degree rule and contain both a Match on Action and a Reverse shot.
The 180 degree rule is the rule whereby there is a perpendicular line running through the camera, and you cannot turn the camera round and face where it was previously shooting from. See diagram below. This is similar to the 4th Wall element where on a set, one of the walls is non-existent as the cameras film from this point.
One of which is the fact we were using an active school. Therefore there will have been activities in the background that we could not account for in our film. To get round this we chose a location that was for the most part surrounded by stationary objects, however it is difficult to exclude everything in the background.
Another issue we experienced was the weather. As we began shooting on a foggy November morning we had no control over how foggy it would stay, as shooting the footage is considerably more time consuming than the final product. 1 minute's worth of footage can be equivalent to 2 hours filming. This presented a problem whereby in the pace of weather and ambient lighting changes is disproportionate to our in-film timescale.
One issue we had on our film that was not related to continuity was a water droplet on the lens, we did not spot this until the editing stage (by which time the lighting and weather were too different for a re-shoot). This produced a distorted edge on 2 scenes breaking the continuity.
Labels: continuity, practical
posted by James at
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
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