Continuity Editing is when you put edit shots together to make a “seamless chain of events”. There are different ways to continuity edit. Scenes will not go together smoothly and whatever you are filming will not believable without continuity editing.
This clip of the secret garden has several components of continuity editing. Firstly, at 00:15 we see Mary, the little girl, look through a dense bush into a hole in the fence. The first shot is of her back as she leans into the hole, and the next shot is of her face looking in. This is angle, reverse angle, where the camera shows the same action from multiple viewpoints. Immediately after that, we see what Mary is looking at, which is a cut led by her action. We first see her looking, and then we see what she is looking at via editing. At 1:05 we see an eye-line match cut at which the two characters appear to be looking at each other. At 00:25 we see what the article refers to as the “Respect for the action line” or the 180 degree rule. This rule ensures that the action takes place in the same place in the same time even when the camera is moving. To ensure that it should neve rmove beyond 180 degrees. This clip also has movement between shots showing Mary and Dickon, the young boy moving through the labyrinthine gardens, coming and going.
The next clip I have is of a montage from the movie Clueless. The montage theory states that a clip (a) and a clip (b) put next to each other equal clip (c ), an entirely new meaning. In this type of editing, the audience is to make the connection between cuts and the montages can be very ambiguous and still get the point across. Although the clip I chose, is fairly obvious as to what’s happening, it still counts as a montage because of the way the cuts are ordered. The actions in each cut are unrelated spatially and with timing to the one before it. The audience assumes this all happens within a matter of hours, or days.
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