CONTINUITY

CONTINUITY SCENE REVIEW BY MICHAEL C. BUNGAY

 

My group for Horror Week and I were assigned to experiment with Continuity in Film Scenes as one final experiment before we started making our Horror Film. We had a to film a continuous sequence about ten seconds long then film the scene again from different angles and edit them into the original ten second sequence without breaking Continuity. We collected up the required equipment from Ollie Samuel’s room, F308 and went down to the parking area outside G Block to do our filming.

There were relatively few problems with communication apart from the difficulty of trying to film and instruct each other from a distance. Plus, not everyone in the group was focussed and often had to be told to remain silent while we were filming.

The filming went reasonably well apart from the fact that there were a lot of students coming into and out of the buildings which meant we had to abort our filming until there were less people around several times. My group members were also distracted just generally winding up each other and also winding up other students coming in and out of the buildings.   

The editing went really badly as Donovan attempted to save the raw footage onto his SD Card rather than his hard drive like he was supposed to and as a result, we ended up losing all of our footage so we had to borrow footage from the other groups. We later discovered that our raw footage was still on the camera.

I gained a better understanding of Continuity in Film and how it works by filming the same scene from different angles without any breaks in Continuity which is something I had to keep a very close eye on during Horror Week as my group’s director. I have also all but got the hang of using Adobe Premier Pro without asking for assistance as I did my individual edit with minimal assistance from Mark Garvey. I also learned to be more observant of recorded footage as I had to look very carefully at the footage to see where I could potentially edit it without breaking Continuity.

Next time, we will transfer our raw footage using our hard drives like we are supposed to do as we do not need an SD Card of our own unless we are transferring images from our mobile phones. This is so that we do not end losing our raw footage, leaving us with nothing to edit unless we borrow other groups’ footage. 

We used a Canon XF100 Camcorder supplied by the Media Department to do our filming and were supposed to use Adobe Premier Pro on the Computers in F308 to do our editing until we found out our raw footage was still on the camera due to Donovan’s attempt to use his SD Card instead of our hard drives, leaving us with nothing to edit.

 

 

As my group had lost all our footage, I borrowed Ellouise Marney’s Group’s footage and despite Ollie Samuel telling me I could leave and the editing for this task was not as essential as it had been for previous tasks, I still felt I ought to make the effort to do my own edit. Once I had finished my edit, relatively unassisted, I uploaded it to YouTube and sent the link to Ollie Samuel and my website that I had just published for Natalie Cooper.    

The most important thing we need to learn is that the Canon XF100 Camcorder does not require an SD Card because it already has a built-in one and that when we come to transfer our footage, we are supposed to use our hard drives and that we have use the Export and Import options on Adobe Premier Pro as that saves the footage. Clicking File and Save As does not work like that and puts us in danger of losing our footage, I have already learnt that the hard way before now. We also need to learn to focus and not waste time winding up each other and other people.