ABSTRACT
Continuity is perhaps the most important element of invisible technique: it’s all about maintaining the illusion by avoiding jarring cuts that will take the audience out of the flow of the story. A planned lack of continuity can be a useful technique to create tension and confusion in a scene but be very careful not to overdo it. Again, it’s about organizing the material for the brain—to make it understandable, but understandable in the way the cinematographers want it to be understood—this is the primary goal of editing a narrative film and thus it has to be a primary goal of how the cinematographers go about shooting the original material. One type of continuity that plays a large role in the editor’s decision about choosing the edit point between two shots of an actor is head position. Whether the actor’s head is up or down, turned left or right is something the audience is likely to notice.
