Job Description: Today I’m going to talk about
writing continuity. This is the job I currently have!
If you work in an English department, this might be part
of your job, but most companies like to hire freelancers to do this. Even if
you don’t have to write the continuity itself, you will still need to know what
it is. You will probably have to assemble a CCSL (combined continuity and
spotting list) at some point. Most English departments hire outside freelancers
for the continuity writing because it is time consuming and the members of the
team will have other tasks which are more pressing with tighter deadlines.
I use the job title “continuity writer.”
Continuity is a shot-by-shot description of the complete action
of a movie. Occasionally a trailer will also require continuity. And yes, every
shot. Most movies average around fifteen hundred shots, but I’ve worked on a
few movies which have had over 4000 shots and some with under 500 shots. It
just depends on the editing style and genre. Action movies, superhero movies
and some comedies will have higher shot counts while dramas and actual horror
films, not slasher, but like suspenseful horror films, will be on the lower end
of shot counts. Although you never know for sure.
Though the continuity focuses on the main action, it will
include any text which appears on screen, including details about signs even if
they are in the background and more atmospheric than something the viewer needs
to read, as well as including descriptions of action in the background or
information about new locations to help set the scene. Once background action
is described, it can be left out of subsequent entries in the same scene so
that the entries can just focus on main action.
Since the continuity will be placed with the dialogue and
spotting lists, no mention of dialogue gets included in it. You might
occasionally include notes about sounds, like if a doorbell rings or something,
but in general you could write the continuity with the picture muted and still
include the majority of what needs to go into the it, because it’s just based
on what you can see.
Why continuity: The CCSL document gets sent to the
library of congress as part of the official paper record of a film. It can also
get sent to some territories where the translator technologically can’t access
the film as easily as some other places. So the translator can read the CCSL
and have a more complete understanding of the film than they would otherwise
have just from the dialogue list or spotting list with annotations if they
can’t easily access picture.
On independent films, they might not even know why they are
writing a CCSL with continuity, they will just have been told it is a “delivery
requirement,” meaning that a larger company will not consider buying the small
film unless this document has already been created and paid for by the original
production company. Usually, these are not as thorough as one created by an
English department.
Example: Here’s an example of some continuity I’ve
written for a short documentary a friend and I have been working on. Usually
the client will provide a list of shot in-times, which can then just be spot
checked while working, so you are only responsible for the writing part.
Or, here’s a sample of some continuity I’ve written for some
shots around my house.
For the actual writing part, the entries contain a
screenplay-like slug line each time the location changes. The slug line
includes whether the scene takes place inside or outside (INT. or EXT.), where
the location is, usually from large to small. Like a scene of me sitting here
might start with INT. Tujunga / Camille’s House / Main Room. Then the slug line
includes a general term for time of day, usually either day or night, although
dusk and dawn are sometimes used if it is important to the plot. Then normally the
shot framing is given- which is a description of how close to the subject of
the shot the camera is, I’ll explain a little bit more about this later - and finally a description is written about
what action happens in the scene. It could be as short as MCS - Camille, or
more involved, like MCS - Camille. She sits in front of a scarf-draped piano
which has vases of flowers and various knickknacks on it.
Then repeat with the next shot until you reach the end of
the movie.
If you’ve seen Avengers: Age of Ultron, imagine the big
fight scene near the end when all of the Ultron drones fight with the Avengers.
That’s what continuity writing can feel like. You are an Avenger fighting a
seemingly never-ending parade of killer robots. And working on that movie gave
me one of my mottos for continuity writing which is “fight the robot in front
of you.” You can’t spend your time thinking about how many shots there are
still to write in a movie. It becomes overwhelming. You just write one entry at
a time, chugging along, until eventually you will reach the end.
Qualifications and Tests: Just like with other jobs
in or for an English department, you will probably have to take some kind of
English test, although if you worked with one company as a freelancer and someone
from that company moves to a new company, you might not have to take the tests
and will get the work just based on your work history and past relationship.
I’ve never had to take a test specific to continuity
writing. If there is a test, it will be the same general English proficiency
test used for the rest of the English department.
Training: As with most things, you are unlikely to
get a lot of training. You’ll will be given an example document, mostly for
formatting, and probably there will be some kind of guidelines document detailing
how to write continuity. I have written some of these guidelines documents and
always include a page with stick figures to show what different shot framings look
like for my preference.
At the first company I worked for in Hollywood, which was
literally in Hollywood, I spent one Christmas span writing continuity on an
independent film called Palmer’s Pick-Up. This was in the before times when
digital storage was outrageously expensive and 2-gig drives were the size of
shoeboxes, so I had to use a ¾ inch u-matic machine to play the video, with a
TV monitor attached and then write the continuity, inputting time codes by
hand, on a computer in Word. I don’t think I ended up doing the whole movie,
just as much as I could get done as the only person in the office during that
slow time of year.
What kind of person is this good for: The hardest
part of the job is that it is repetitive and tedious. If you are the kind of
person who likes to do intricate hobbies, like beading or painting, or
assembling jigsaw puzzles, you are starting off with a good temperament for it.
When I worked in an English department and hired the freelancers to write the
continuity, it wasn’t uncommon to have people get hired for one or two projects
and decide it wasn’t for them.
The reason I learned how to write continuity for real was
that our freelancer (Hi, John!) decided he had had enough of continuity writing.
We didn’t have another person lined up who could take over, so I jumped in. The
first project I did in this more professional capacity was Shark Boy and Lava
Girl, and I put in way too much detail, which John then had to proofread and critique.
It can take a while to figure out just how much detail to include and when it
is too much and really distracting from the important information of the scene.
So there is a little bit of a learning curve to figure out how much is the
right amount of detail to include.
The downsides: The biggest downside is how tedious this
is. If you can get past that, then the next obstacle you might encounter is the
turnaround time. If you are very slow at this, or just can’t handle doing maybe
500 or more shots in a day, then you could run into trouble with the deadlines.
Usually there is at least one day per reel on a project. A trailer, which is
short, but probably 200 shots, will also have about a day turnaround time. On
some projects, that might not be enough time. Animation is particularly
difficult and time-consuming, so extra time on animated features is always
welcome. I recently finished an animated project which ended up with over
80,000 words of continuity. That’s the size of a short novel, in case you
didn’t know. And on action films, one reel might have more than 1000 cuts, so
getting through that quantity of entries in a day can be difficult to manage,
so extra time on action films is also helpful and should be considered when
accepting a job.
The other downside is that each year it seems like more
companies decide they don’t need continuity anymore. So the pool of available
work is dwindling and I do worry about what will happen when all the companies
decide they no longer require full CCSLs on their movies.
The pay: I’ve managed to work as a freelancer who
primarily writes continuity since late 2013, so for me it is enough money to
live on. Again, the pay can vary greatly from client to client and often isn’t
enough for me to accept a job, especially from smaller companies without big
studio projects. I’ll occasionally take one of those jobs if I have free time
on my schedule, but if that was the only level of work available, I couldn’t
make a living doing this. Also, there are only enough projects for maybe 2 or 3
full-time continuity writers, so there’s a small pool of people who do this
work and who can do enough to make it their primary source of income. In other
words, the work is not abundant enough for a bunch of new people to get into
this line of work.
Wrap Up:
So, to wrap up continuity writing isn’t hard, but it is
tedious. Perfect for me! And I don’t need any more competition from you.
For the people who just nod when I tell them what I do for a
living, I hope this has helped explain it a little better than when I try to
give a quick explanation in casual conversation.
Just one more thing
you probably didn’t know was happening behind the scenes in the movies.
Don’t forget to subscribe while you’re here, if you made it this far to the end of the video! Thanks for watching!