For Continuity's Sake

Call it overexposure to media, or the rising persistence of the masses, but regardless I've just been suckered into as many as eight episodes of a single trashy show, released on Netflix and anticipated for months. Was the writing up to even past semi-par? Did I not have other compelling things to do? Why, after the first two episodes fell so terribly flat, did I not simply shut down my laptop and return to the order of the day? Continuity, you needle me so.

On Monday I filmed a scene, and for those who work in the medium know, you don't just shoot what's in the script. You cut, you jump, you angle. Listening to these performances, with tech changes inbetween, teaches you that the camera is sent to record stutters. The boom pole catches whiffs. Relationships of space and time are divided into fragments, toothpicks of meaning. These whittled nothings are sewn back together again, glued as seamlessly as possible, so the gaps are invisible.

Life's all fits and starts. You make plans by logic, by the order of things, for continuity's sake. Then everything leapfrogs, clips and fragments dashing in bounds over one another. You step outside of yourself to watch the story be told. And as any good editor would, you come up with a sequence to form the frames.