Edit Suite: Five Types of Continuity

Continuity is the complex craft of making the hundreds or even thousands of small parts of a program seem like a single, continuous whole. In big studio productions, perfect continuity is so important that crews always include a script supervisor to oversee it.
Even script supervisors can’t catch everything. Remember the disaster movie, Twister? In one shot a truck windshield is shattered by flying debris; but a few shots later, the windshield is magically whole again. In the opening of the cult classic The Stunt Man, a character dives through a closed screen door, ripping one side of the screen. In the matching shot from the outside, the same screen is ripped down the center instead. What we have here is a failure to continuate! Specifically, a failure to match information.
Information is only the first of five related types of continuity. The other four are action, look, movement, and convention; and it’s useful to study all five of them.

Continuity of Information

Information mismatches occur because shots covering the same material may be made minutes, hours, or days apart, often out of chronological order. Many television sitcoms are composites of two or three different takes, and this can lead to strange quirks of continuity in an edited program. A soda teleports from right hand to left, or Rosco’s police cruiser in The Dukes of Hazzard alternates between a Ford, a Pontiac and a Lincoln in one chase scene. In Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, pieces on a chess board in one scene magically disappear a few seconds later. Why? Because the actor and director have forgotten the details of one shot by the time they make the next.
Why care about such trivia? Because every mistake reminds your audience that what they’re seeing isn’t real. Before you know it, they’re watching the production instead of the show. That may be okay for a twisted comedy like Airplane, but in most cases your goal is to make the craft invisible.
What’s the best way to avoid information mismatches? Simple: when you set up a shot, run the footage of the shot(s) it should match, look at the details and take notes if necessary. If you shoot in the classical style, review the master shot of the scene (containing all or most of the action) and then match all the other shots to it. You can also take a Polaroid or digital picture of each scene to compare with the others later. If you don’t shoot a master, match the new shot to the other shots that will bracket it in the finished program.<…