The Handover - Mastering The Continuity System

What you see here is our first film which we created complying to the continuity system of editing.

We decided to concentrate heavily on what camera shots we would use and also complying to the rules that we have learnt in our first few Media BTEC lessons.

First of all we needed to make sure that we included all of the shots we needed to. The main shots we needed to include were five close ups and two matches on action. This way we could show the emotion from the characters and also follow the action of the film.

The first rule :

180 degree rule / axis of action 

This was one of the most important rules we needed to comply with as we had a lot of shots where the characters switched between each other. This rule states that there is an imaginary axis across a 180 degree line that you cannot cross. Crossing this line would mean there would be a continuity error; we watched an example of this in the Mikado advert. We made sure that we didn't have a continuity error when using this rule, James our director and myself imagined the 180 degree axis and this worked well. especially on the sequence where there are many close ups showing emotion.

Match on action 

This is where two or more shots are connected to carry on action through a transition. We used many of these shots through our movie and made sure we complied to the rule. We made sure that we did not skip any of the action and were very deliberate when collating our shots we did not miss anything.

Eye - line match 

We used the eye - line match a lot in our movie as well. This is where there is a 3rd person view of the character and then a 1st person view of the character's vision. This is a key rule in the continuity system of editing.  A key example of this in our movie is the grand unveiling of what is in the brief case. We have multiple clips placed together in order to show what is both in the brief case and also the character's expression.

Shot - reverse shot 

This rule is mainly used when shooting interviews, we did not have many occasions where we needed to use the shot-reverse shot except for when we switched between characters when they first meet to show expression. The key part of this shot is not to disregard the 180 degree rule, this will make everything work. For example you need to shoot over the shoulder and on opposite shoulders e.g. left shoulder on one, right shoulder on the other.

Sound 

We were not allowed to use dialogue in our movie which meant that the music track we used was hugely important. Due to our movie turning from a thriller to a comedy it was important we had two incidental music tracks that vastly contrasted each other. We found these and they complimented the movie very well.

Lighting 

All of the lighting we used in our movie was natural lighting. We made sure we did not shoot early or late in the day as the lighting is harder to control. We had to re-shoot a few clips as they were either under of over exposed, overall we are happy with the consistency with the lighting and we managed to capture some really nice shadows as well.

Camera Shots : 

We used a large selection of shots in our film. The majority of them were close ups as we needed to capture a lot of emotion and also action. Our opening shot was a long shot as we needed to set the scene of the surroundings.

Camera Angles : 

We used a large array of camera angles also. My personal favourite shot is the worms eye view where the two characters sit down ready for 'The handover'. We also used a lot of low angle shots to look up to the intimidating characters.

You can find the finished video here :



I hope this gives you some insight into the making of our first short video where we had to comply with the continuity system of editing.