HEY! THIS IS ABOUT CONTINUITY! MAKE SURE YOU READ ALL THE PREVIOUS POSTS FIRST BEFORE YOU CONTINUE TO THIS ONE!!!!!!! (I’ll add more emphasis with more exclamation marks.) !!!!!!!!! (That should get my point across.)!
So, from my previous post about Continuity, I advised that I like consistency and continuity. Continuity is a great thing for me because I like to look at the background. Even when I am talking to someone face to face, I look at the background often. I like to see what’s going on around me. I like to try to see the little things, the things that no one else bothers to notice. My wife surmises that this is why I like to take the most backward way somewhere, if there’s a direct route and a scenic route, I will almost always take the scenic route. I just find it more interesting.
But in regards to continuity, I think of watching movies and TV shows. I watch a lot of TV and movies. While I pay attention to the actors and what you’re supposed to see, I also pay attention to things in the background and such.
A great example of this is, the other day my wife and I were watching a cooking competition that we enjoy called Cutthroat Kitchen, hosted by Alton Brown. (He is a personal favourite in our household.) There was a contestant who was talking about something or other and he had already sliced onions on his board. The next scene was the same contestant taking an onion onto a clean cutting board and dicing it up. This tells me that when they edited the scenes for TV they put stuff out of order for the sake of intrigue.
These are always the things I notice, if I am at home watching TV or a DVD then I will pause it and rewind and show it to the rest of my family. I know it irks them that I do it, because it ruins the flow of the program we’re watching for them, but the item being out of place ruins the flow of the program for me.
There are a couple of websites out there that show supposed mistakes on movies and such and some are definitely continuity errors but others are a shot of a scene where a guy has his gun a certain way and then the next shot of the scene, from a different angle, the gun is a different way. It’s not like they changed out a .357 Magnum for a Colt .44, it’s just the way the gun is being held. This to me is a natural change for the actor/character.
Another supposed error was a guard who was holding a pike/spear, and in the next angle his hand was moved down 6 inches. Again, was that a continuity error, probably, but it could have been a natural change for the character. Maybe it was actually written in the screenplay that the character moved his hand down.
I don’t know, I just think that for sure continuity is very important in TV and movies. I know for a fact that these same mistakes that are being made now weren’t made 20 years ago. I think somewhere along the way the eye for detail has disappeared.
That being said about the eye for detail disappearing, I know for a fact that somewhere in this posting I have either misspelled something or used punctuation where it wasn’t needed or missed it where it was needed. For that I apologize.
Anyways Carry On.