Production Skills- Continuity

In Production Skills we had a lesson about continuity and the importance of it in a Film and TV production, without it you can pull your audience out of the experience and lose their attention because they have lost that belief in your film and recognise the cuts and the fact it is just a film. We looked at a few examples of mistakes with continuity in films and the most well known one is a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, theres a scene where there about to order food and the Uma Thurman character starts smoking, throughout the scene and the various cuts the cigarette starts jumping from hand to hand and in each new cut it is in the opposite hand from before. Some continuity errors are hard to find and are only noticed if you look for them but if their are some continuity errors in your film then some one will find them. To help reduce the chance of these from happening, you can have a member of your crew be in charge of making sure the continuity is correct and that your not going to be doing something that you can't repeat again for another shot.

While looking at continuity we also had a challenge where one group would look at a number of items on a table and try to memorise as many as they could and then leave the room, another group would then come up and move and take items away to see if the first group would notice. It was a good challenge to test peoples memories and to see what certain people remember and don't. We also looked at a trick called the Monkey Business Illusion or The Invisible Gorilla, which is a video of a group of people walking around passing basketballs around and you have to count how many times the balls switch hands, while this is happening a man in a gorilla costume walks into the middle of the screen and walks out, but because your attention is focusing on counting the balls you don't notice the gorilla. This was interesting to see because it makes you wonder how many other illusions and tricks can you get a way with on film and it would be interesting to see how far you could take this idea.