lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (10/06/83)
Errors in films and television programs where some element of a scene is not "where it should be" are known "officially" as continuity errors. At least for most films, there is usually a specific member of the crew who has the sole job of checking and verifying continuity during the course of filming. One rather obvious continuity botch (also involving a blackboard, interestingly enough) is in "Animal House". Watch the scene in the classroom where our professor writes the word SATAN on the blackboard. He writes it directly across the very visible vertical border between two segments of the board, with the border right in the middle of the word. We cut away for a quick reaction shot of the students, cut back... and see that SATAN has been rewritten, this time with a completely different offset from the border. Tut tut. One thing to always watch for in films and television is obvious clocks! They are a prime target for continuity errors. In many films, I've watched the clock advance by hours in a few seconds, or not advance at all during a 10 minute scene. In the latter case, this indicates that the crew "cleverly" stopped the clock to *avoid* problems, only to create one! One of my favorites involved a horrible SF film from about 1970 where a pendulum clock was clearly visible in the backround. The pendulum was obviously motionless, so we knew that the crew had stopped the clock. A few cuts later, the clock had advanced by about 12 hours, and the pendulum still wasn't moving! The explanation seems to revolve around the fact that this part of the film was shot in someone's home, not on a real set. Between shoots, the occupant of the house obviously wanted to have their clock working, but whenever a shoot took place they stopped the clock again. Truly bizarre. Watch for those clocks! You won't be disappointed. --Lauren--