Speaker 1: Take a look at the scene. Take a look at the scene. Notice anything? If you did, good for you. You have a very keen eye. I cut that scene and I probably watched it more than a hundred times, often sitting with the director together, and I never noticed the mistake. And then one day I happened to stop right at this frame and it hit me. I asked Mark, did you notice anything? And he didn't. Mark is wearing no jacket and now he's wearing a jacket. This is a failure of continuity editing. Thank you, Marshall. Continuity editing is the process of combining more or less related shots so as to direct the viewer's attention to a pre-existing consistency of story across both time and physical location. And here we're breaking that rule. Clearly when you make a mistake like this they can really hurt the success of a film. Did you see it? How about this one? It seems that continuity gaffes are rampant in film. If you watch closely during the scene with

Speaker 2: the velociraptor you may notice an out-of-place hand. In the first Pirates

Speaker 1: of the Caribbean film you can clearly see a crew member over Jack Sparrow's

Speaker 2: shoulder. Predictable damage ensues but seconds later that same windshield is

Speaker 1: seen in perfect condition. And many are not shy to make fun of the filmmakers. But how this floating broom pantomime made it into the finished film is anyone's

Speaker 2: guess. Let's enjoy that special Star Wars moment again. We're just saying that some script supervisors or editors could have done their jobs just a teeny bit better.

Speaker 1: Should we put the blame on the script supervisor on set or later the editor who for some reason or another not cut it correctly like I did. And then how do some of the greats feel about continuity errors? Thelma Schoonmaker, the iconic editor who worked on many of Martin Scorsese's films, says in an interview The priority is absolutely on the best take for performance and frankly I don't understand why people get so hung up on these issues. It doesn't matter. You know why? Because you're being carried along by the power of the film. Is she in denial? Martin Hunter, the editor for Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket says There's a cut when the drill sergeant punches Matthew Motley in the stomach and in one shot he pulls back with his left hand and in the cut he punches with his right. Nobody ever pointed it out as far as I know. But those kinds of things don't really matter because if a scene is effective you shouldn't be distracted by things like that. Walter Murch is so uninterested in continuity editing he actually gives it the least priority in terms of when to make a cut. He writes an ideal cut for me is the one that satisfies the following six criteria at once. Emotion, story, rhythm, eye trace, two-dimensional plane of screen and lastly three-dimensional space of action. Emotion, it's the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six elements to make a cut, sacrifice your way up from the bottom. So three legendary editors all don't really care all that much about continuity. Are they just full of it or is there actually some science behind it? Timothy J Smith is a lecturer of physiological sciences in Birkbeck University of London and he studies all kinds of visual cognition. He did some extensive tests with eye tracking where he traces the eye movement to find out where audiences look and what they pay attention to. Attentional synchrony is where the majority of viewers will have their eyes focused in on the same element of a screen. The number one predictor of where most people are going to look in a frame or rather what they will pay attention to is whether there's a human face in the shot. If it is, science tells us that all the attention is geared towards that and that's why so many continuity problems go unnoticed. It actually turns out that Hitchcock, who's a master at composing shots, really understood this concept.

Speaker 3: Now for a Hitchcock film, you have 65% of the cortex is correlated when you're watching Hitchcock.

Speaker 2: I'm not required to answer this question, right? This is scaring me.

Speaker 1: Humans study other human faces. When it comes to still images, viewers tend to look at the eyes. When it comes to moving images, we tend to look around the nose and move up and down between the mouth and the eyes as we're trying to understand what somebody's saying or the emotions that they're expressing. That's a question shot and sweet?

Speaker 2: In my bed, what's better than that?

Speaker 1: I have to say, first-time filmmakers tend to point out continuity errors and they're very concerned about fixing these problems to the point where they're willing to sacrifice a performance or a moment. So, for example, in this scene, Mark has to take his three-year-old son and move out of the house because he can't afford the rent anymore. And as he's walking down the stairs, a continuity error happens. You see it? You can see the camera. And we could have decided to cut around it, but it would have broken this moment that really played most powerful in real time. So when does continuity matter?

Speaker 2: Pretty much never.

Speaker 1: And if it does, then maybe there's something wrong. And in a poll, the majority pretty much said that they don't care as long as the scene works. But Larry writes, I often notice them, especially now that I'm studying filmmaking. Bert says, I don't look for them, so if I end up noticing them, they tend to bother me. Steve says, I have an error that I actually find more interesting than an actual floor. And Martin Scorsese says, I don't look for them, so if I end up noticing them, they tend to bother me. Steve says, I have an error that I actually find more interesting than an actual floor. In Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, there's what I believe to be an implied continuity error during the interrogation scene. For me personally, I think it's what both Scorsese and Schoonmaker's decision to use is as a device to throw the audience into nothing-is-as-it-seems state of mind. I hope you got a kick out of this episode. Check out the video description for more research on the topic and hopefully I'll see you soon. Thanks for watching.