Friday, July 9, 2010

SHOOT RECAP - continuity

If there was one thing, just one thing, to have more use of during this shoot(besides of course TIME) it would not be camera gear, locations, lights, grips, gaffers, craft service, or sound equipment... it’d be... FULL TIME continuity.

Oh how this little project would have gone so much smoother with someone, taking note of all those actors being here, there, who’s hand was doing this, head turned like that. Yes, you can edit around this stuff when ya got lots of coverage, but shooting up to ten pages a day didn’t allow much of that. The actors did remarkably well, considering, but still TOTALLY paid in post... totally...
Paid in other ways too with basically no one keeping track of all those lines of dialog? In one example, the script had to actually be modified, solely to fix when one of the actors referred to on thing one way here and another way there... a flub that would need no correcting if we had a freaking continuity person.
Yes, the Real Deal had his crew were constantly taking pictures of sets, but props still kept moving around all over the place. A continuity person, any continuity person, would have been just what the Real Deal needed to keep his peeps spending more time on their real jobs.
And speaking of real jobs, it was left to the actors to keep track of their wardrobe, where and when. Luckily, our story takes place during a small amount of time, meaning very little ‘costume’ changes. But sure would have ben nice having someone besides an actor keeping track of all that stuff.
Having said all that, we actually did have a continuity person for about two days, inclusive of the 11 page mother of all scenes when we REALLY needed it.... and needless to say for those two days, Tom was the most popular person on set.
photos by Suzan Jones

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