CONTINUITY - WHAT HAPPENED?

Here is a music video featuring the young singer, Holly Kay, who has a role in Flicka 3 (or Flicka - Country Pride) as the singer at the Equestrian Event kick-off party, along with clips from the movie.




Also, here is a scene from Flicka - Country Pride where Kelly, the main character, meets Flicka for the first time.



The movie is out today on DVD and BluRay!

Now, just a note; if you have a keen eye you may have noticed that the horse is wearing a halter when she exits the trailer and when Kelly reaches out to her. But when Flicka rears up, there is no halter. This is what is known as a continuity error (or gaffe on some websites that love to track these things). Part of my role on set is to make sure errors such as this one don't occur. However, sometimes it is out of my hands, as in this case. The horse wrangler did not want Flicka wearing her halter for her rear up for safety reasons, but she needed to be wearing it before and after for handling reasons. So what the viewer may perceive as an error or oversight was a deliberate choice for safety reasons.

Many times continuity is sacrificed for other more important reasons. And sometimes it is sacrificed because the director, once I point the issue out to him, isn't concerned as he thinks no one will notice, and/or he loved the performance so we keep it as it is. Often it is a time issue - we just have too much to shoot that day and there is no time for another take no matter how much I plead. Sometimes it appears there was a continuity error when, in fact, the scene may have been shot in perfect continuity but the editor has trimmed a portion of the scene which then creates a continuity issue. For example, if an actor comes into the room with a sweater on, takes it off and then proceeds with the action; the part where she takes the sweater off is trimmed to keep the scene 'tight' (keep the pace of the scene and/or get rid of boring superfluous action) and then when we cut back to her - no sweater and it looks like we forgot she should have been wearing one.

Sometimes the error is caught in the first take and rectified. In that case I always make a note in my paperwork saying something to the effect of; "Please don't use take 1, he wasn't wearing his sunglasses." But then the editor will use that take anyway. I actually had this happen to me, with sunglasses, on a movie. Then, watching it months later, I immediately saw the error and jumped up off of the couch in horror. I couldn't remember if I had made a mistake or if it was for a reason I just stated so I ran to the garage where I kept binders of all of my show notes and found the one for the movie and quickly located the scene with my notes. There it was in CAPITAL letters and starred: ***DO NOT USE TAKE 1*** missing sunglasses!!!. Yet they used it. I have no idea why. Perhaps the other takes were unusable for technical reasons or perhaps they didn't read my note and didn't notice. Either way, it makes me look bad and drives me around the bend.

Sunglasses ON

So, very often it is not that the script supervisor wasn't paying attention, it is that she was overruled, or it was lost in an edit, or the editor can't be bothered to read the notes (the first time I had an editor say to me "Oh I never bother reading your notes", I was SO insulted. It is a LOT of work to keep up with the notes. It still bothers me to hear that). So keep that in mind the next time you see an error and are ready to blame the scripty.