JPH
Familiar Face
- Messages
- 56
- Location
- The Heart of Screenland, USA
It also happened in "Glory" (1989) too. In the scene when the 54th MA is marching past a group of slaves, Morgan Freeman stops to speak to some children, one of them is wearing a digital wristwatch. Oops.
There have been some good examples of continuity errors mentioned so far, and John did a pretty good job explaining the reasons for some of them.
There are basically 3 types of continuity errors that we are talking about in this thread. The ones made during principle photography, those made during the editing process, and a combination of the first two. The first type are made when there is a mistake made on set with something being moved or altered and not corrected for the next take or several takes being cut together as John mentioned. They also occur in not shooting the desired angle in a manner that matched the other shots. Sometimes this happens when shots are taken out of sequence in different locations. Perhaps a shot that belongs late in the movie is shot at the beginning of filming, then toward the end an action or special effects shot is made where something occurs, like an actor loses his hat. When edited together you get hat on, hat blown off, hat returns with no explanation. Most are not that egregious though.These errors are just what they are.
The only way to correct them is to use a shot that maintains the continuity but may drastically alter or even destroy the look, feel or flow the director is going for by being the wrong angle or the performance from the actors may not be optimum. That's then a choice of "lesser of two evils" in many cases. Since many errors are overlooked or not noticed by most viewers, add that retakes are expensive and time consuming, the choice is often simple. Although, sometimes it's just a matter of somebody missing the mistake until it's too late.
Then there are the continuity errors due to using multiple cameras to get shots at a number of angles. These sometimes result in seeing the same car go around the same corner several times in the same car chase, but from different angles, or the same soldier toss his rifle into the air and dramatically fall to the ground repeatedly during the big battle scene. This is the result of covering the shot as mentioned above, but in the name of economy the different angles of the same stunt are reused multiple times to stretch out the action.
The other editing errors are in poor shot selection when using stock or archive footage of the wrong type aircraft or other vehicles, scenery, weather or what have you. These errors can be either from ignorance of which aircraft or vehicle is which, apathy in trying to match the aircraft or vehicle by viewing hundreds or even thousands of hours of footage to find a match, or the lack of any footage of that aircraft or vehicle doing what they need to be in the shot. Choices are made, some are acceptable under the circumstances, some are so bad a blind man could see them.
Hindsight is 20/20 as they say.
Joseph
