Edit Suite: Continuity
In video and film, "continuity" refers to the many strategies utilized by the director and editor to create the illusion of, yes, a continuous program out of a bunch of separate shots. Continuity consists of all the techniques employed to arrange those pieces into a mosaic picture in which the individual stones are invisible to the viewer.
Reduced to the bare essentials, making a movie is a three step process:
- First you take a continuous narrative (whether a story or a nonfiction subject) and break it down into separate pieces small enough to record as individual shots.
- Then you shoot those shots, duplicating (or overlapping) action from one shot to the next.
- Finally, you reassemble the narrative by placing the shots end-to-end in order, while trimming the overlaps and discarding the unwanted duplicates.
As you can see, two out of three parts of the process are the responsibility of the director and the editor performs only the re-assembly (even if that editor is simply the director modeling a diffe…
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