#continuity editing

[vixcai]

104 White Rabbit

114 Special

117 ...In Translation

119 Deus Ex Machina

Some of my favorite transition scenes/match cuts from LOST S1

[fourdiagnosesinatrenchcoat]

The actual problem with Eliot's relationship with his father Goliath is that we are first made to understand that he was back and forth to his hometown to see his high school girlfriend while he was doing his special ops work.

But he never even crossed paths with his father on those visits to a small town?

Even if we assume that ex-girlfriend and her father are living somewhere else training horses, there were implied YEARS of recurring visits home, long and often enough that it took her a very long time to decide to break things off and marry someone else

[mx-lamour]

I've got another one for ye.

How often do you suppose adventurers come in through the mists and do their thing?

When (like, what year) do you suppose was the first?

When do you suppose Strahd starts creating vampire spawn? And like, how does he pick them? We know he makes zombies out of a lot of folk. Which people get to be spawn, other than the brides?

Strahd had three different "vampire slaves" (essentially also brides; very Dracula), Irina, Marya, and Sura, who were apparently killed in Vampire of the Mists (I'm relying on Mistipedia right now; haven't had a chance to read it yet). So like, he's been busy between Tatyanas.

I don't necessarily need to flesh out every spawn who ever was (especially since the adventurers certainly won't encounter them all), but I am trying to create a timeline history of things, and I got pretty stuck after Olya (Tatyana reincarnation #2).

I think Ana is Tatyana reincarnation #3, and like, damn that's early. I would have thought it would take longer for her to get even partially out of the mists. Was Jander then the first outlander to get sucked into Barovia?

I've been trying to figure out where to fit the four brides from the module into the timeline, and layering in some other events between them, but I've been having a weird time with it. I'm also not 100% sure when will be best to bring Alek back into the picture, although I am definitely going to.

[paintingafterpainting]

CONTINUITY EDITING

[rosecorcoranwrites]

Editing Advice Part 1: Continuity

Although I said I wouldn't be giving writing advice on this blog, I never said anything about editing advice. Plenty of people give (unhelpful, short-sighted, or far too niche) writing advice, but few focus on the crucial final part of the writing process, and yet, editing is what gives a lot of writers the most trouble. I personally love editing far more than the initial writing stage and so am here to offer my advice in not one, not two, not even three, but four—yes four!—blog posts!

First, let's look at continuity, in three categories: Time, Place, and People. Technically, you ought to keep continuity in mind throughout the writing process, but it's still easy to forget one or two things. Thus, when you finally decide "I'm going to edit this WIP!", you need to double check that everything is consistent, not just from a plot standpoint, but from a spacial, chronological, and personal standpoint as well.

Time

This includes character ages (especially in flashbacks and exposition), the beginning and endings of school years, the seasons and their weather patterns, moon phases (especially when writing about werewolves), times of day, how long it takes for events to happen (a wound to heal, DNA to come back from the lab, traveling from point A to point B), historical matters (phraseology, having characters use things that hadn't been invented yet, people in the middle ages eating potatoes, etc.) and so on.

One time, I was reading a WIP where their main character's (or MC's) sister, who was twelve, was being discussed. The MC said that her sister had been dating someone at the same time the MC was first learning to use her magic powers. Fine, except that later it was stated that she first learned to use those powers five years ago. Which would make the sister seven at the time. Ain't no seven-year-old datin' nobody. The author of the WIP had just forgotten that all the characters ages would change, not just the main character's.

In my own writing, I had to be very careful in Outcast Shadows, because two groups of characters were in two locations doing two things: Group A was traveling across a continent, while Group B were hanging out in a single building in a single city. But they had to meet up at the end of the book, under specific circumstances, so I had to make sure that both storylines took the same amount of time. In the first draft, Group A took far longer than Group B, which was disastrous! I had to go back and, first, measure exactly how long it would take Group A to do all their traveling and find things for Group B to do that made sense for the story to fill up that specific amount of time.

As careful as I was in Outcast Shadows, though, I completely forgot that Misha left a certain location a day earlier than everyone else in Recast Light—and this was after four rewrites. I had to account for what he was doing for an entire day, which meant rewriting several scenes. It ended up working out in the end, but is a cautionary tale I won't soon forget.

Place

This includes anything spacial, such as the layouts of rooms, buildings, cities, and continents; the blocking of character movements; light sources; the configuration of the the solar system; and so on.

For example, if your character was flat on his back a few sentences ago, but now he's standing, were we ever told that he got up? Did your characters, while touring the lower rooms of a castle, ever climb something in order to get to that second story room where they end up (mine didn't, in the first draft of Miscast Spells!). If your scene takes place in a dark and dingy torch-lit tavern, how can your characters notice tiny details, or are you picturing the scene as brightly lit as it would be with electric lighting?

Obviously, some of this can be fudged a bit—I don't think anyone but me cares about how scenes are lit—but some of it can't. And readers will notice. There was the famous case of Larry Niven's Ringworld, in which a character is teleporting east in order to extend his birthday, but of course the earth rotates east, meaning he would actually be moving later into the day, or even into the next, rather than earlier. So many readers noticed that Niven actually corrected it in later editions. Then there is Stephanie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, in which the Cullens have a house on an island off the west coast of Rio de Janeiro which, you know, doesn't have a west coast. These authors had professional editors who didn't catch these mistakes, so you can't rely on other people to notice continuity errors for you. Do your own research and know the layout of your own setting, especially if it's the setting we all live in.

People

This category includes what your characters have, what they know, and who they are.

For what they have, consider clothing and accessories, weapons, and useful items. If they don't have an umbrella, but it's raining in your scene, do they just stand there in the rain? Do they like it? Aren't they cold? If your character has some huge rucksack full of gear, they should always have that rucksack full of gear unless we can assume they left it in a safe place; if they're traveling from one end of the continent to the other, mention how heavy that rucksack is from time to time, and consider where it is during a fight or action scene (Are they still carrying it? Do they drop it? Do they pick it back up when they flee?).

Another thing that characters can have is injuries, which, unless magically healed, have lasting effects. If your character got punched in the face yesterday, they should have a bruise show up in a day or two, and last for about a week (she writes, realizing that she has had a character bruise far too fast in her own published book!). If your character has lost a lot of blood, or broken a bone, or received a concussion, all of that needs to be taken into account in the coming chapters. Again, this can usually be solved by a quick mention that such and such still hurt, but injuries will also impact how much traveling and fighting your character can do, so keep that in mind, too.

Be mindful, also, of what people in your story know, including POV and non-POV characters. A pet peeve of mine is when authors in multi-viewpoint narratives slip up and have the viewpoint character be privy to what other characters are thinking when there is no reason for them to know that. Then there is the opposite problem, typically in first person present tense stories, where, in order to have exposition, the MC will randomly be thinking about information that everyone in the setting already knows. It would be like reading a novel set in our world and having the first person narrator think "243 years ago, America declared independence from Britain, which it had formerly been a colony of. This was followed by what is known as the Revolutionary War, where the Patriots, on the American side, fought the Red Coats, the British soldiers". No one thinks that way, because they personally already know it; who are they explaining it to, themselves? Find a more natural way for this information across to the audience. Maybe the character is arguing about it with an friend or is helping a younger sibling with their homework.  For this sort of thing, dialogue is definitely your friend, but still, double check to make sure this seems natural.

Finally, think about who your characters are, as opposed to who you wanted them to be. Characters change and grow over the course of writing, and what you might have considered in-character when you were outlining the novel might be out-of-character now. Consider your character's emotional reactions, moral choices, word choice, and so on. Never let an intended message be a reason to railroad a character into some preconceived destiny. Take the time to look at your character, not as a writer, but as a reader.

This last bit of advice holds true for all parts of editing. Think about how you would view your story as a reader. While beta readers and editors are helpful, you can't put everything on them (especially considering that there are published stories with continuity errors). Think about what a reader might nitpick, and what they might not care about. I suggest caring about it anyway, because it's your story, and it should be the best you can make it. Polishing your story into its bright and shiny best self is what editing is all about, and we've only just begun!

[mx-lamour]

Word play is fun and all, but I'm tearing out a lot of this crypt content and replacing it with sensible historically relevant people and things. Everything is connected to something meaningful or useful. Pun trap dungeon is a no from me, sorry.

Not saying there's no traps. Just that the content beyond the traps is worth the hassle.

[mx-lamour]

Well go on, how are you gonna lore your Argynvostholt? oO

You're right, I should have followed this up. Get some water and strap yourselves in, ok? I saved my initial brainstormy post in my drafts, so... I guess I'm prepared for this. Are you? (dun dun dun...)

First thing: I want to use I, Strahd as the Tome, as-is, full stop. And I want it to be accurate (accurate to what Strahd thinks/believes happened, anyway--not propaganda, not a mislead). This has been my biggest hurdle, re: Argynvostholt.

I, Strahd sets up the von Zarovich army and the valley it conquers as incredibly low-magic. There is magic, yes. However:

The majority of people are suitably spooked by it. The Ba'al Verzi dagger having weird runes on it and the idea that it must draw blood before it can be sheathed are very freaky. When Strahd stands stoic in the face of this weird cult object and reenacts the rite of binding himself to the land again, everybody present (even Alek, "the least pious and most hedonistic of the lot") make signs of the faith. Which of the elements in that event are even by-definition actual magic or just mundane ritual and superstition is mostly left up to interpretation. Strahd did discern some arcane power in the dagger.

Aside from the use of this particular item, the only people who ever perform what seems to be by-the-book, honest-to-god Magic is Ilona (a high-ranking cleric), and Strahd himself (who admits to having limited ability when he's still human, and describes the use of material components in a legit spell almost fifty years thereafter). Leo Dilisnya also uses a number of magical protections that he's scrounged together over the same fifty years, but his use of magic seems to be limited to the traps he had lain for Strahd (which were really solid, but ultimately not enough to defeat a vampire).

Ilona was pretty high up there as far as clerics go. The one cleric more powerful than her was their high preist Kir. The book doesn't say what his abilities were, but we know some of Ilona's abilities. She can tell if someone is telling the truth (Zone of Truth or good insight?). She can Speak With Dead, but she can't always successfully prevent someone from dying or bring them back. There's no way to tell for sure how strong she really is, or what level of life-giving necromacy she could have attempted--especially because she has an army to look out for and might be spreading her resources a little thin at any given time--but from my experiences having played clerics, I'd cast my suspicions around 6th level.

Which is nothing to sneeze at. But. If she is the most powerful spellcaster in Strahd's army (and one of, presumably, very few)...

Would they have defeated a dragon?

Sure, Strahd's army could take out a dragon. I have no doubt. It's probably a pretty sizeable force. Strahd is an effective general. Would there be a lot of casualties? Yes. It is war. That's a thing.

But it would be kind of weird if no one ever referenced the dragon. There again, whatever, I, Strahd is from Strahd's point of view, during a time immediately after the wars are over, and he is not exactly the kind of person who would boast about his victory against a dragon. It probably doesn't even phase him that much. He's probably just like, yes, of course my army subdued a dragon. It is expected. I do not fail.

But what about the revenants?

The module has this very actiony little blurb about how Strahd's army fought the Order of the Silver Dragon and the knights died horribly, and Vladimir was so enraged that he got back up as a revenant and brought a lot of other knights back with him. It's cinematic. It's cool.

But this is where it gets dicey, in relation to I, Strahd. Would Strahd's soldiers have thought twice about fighting an opposing force that will just keep getting back up again? They don't have anything for this, aside from possibly whatever Ilona was prepared for. Even ignoring the argument about which force the army fears more--their fierce human general or the walking dead--would Strahd's army have been able to win?

Against undead? Okay, sure, why not. Maybe Strahd's soldiers don't even realize they are undead, since the bodies are so fresh at that point and covered in armor anyway. Maybe they just don't notice they're fighting the same guys again. They simply don't register that as a possibility; they're just trying to stay alive in the fight. Ilona, who could probably have sensed they were undead, wouldn't have gotten close enough to them to discover it.

Okay, so Strahd's forces could possibly take down Argynvost. They could unwittingly fight a bunch of the recently-undeceased. Fine. That solves my conundrum about the setting's descrepancies in the frequency of magic and supernatural forces.

That's about where I had left it when I was going to ask ye other Curse of Strahd DMs for ideas.

I've encountered more conundrums since then.

Point One being: I think I read that revenants usually have a one-year timer on their revenge before their spirit passes on, heedless of success. But if I'm using I, Strahd as gospel, there would have been at least three years between the Fall of Argynvostholt and the start of the curse. Which means... no revenants in cursed Barovia. Their souls would only have been trapped there in perpetuity if they had still been around when the mists closed in. If they had become revenants at the initial battle, their timers would have long run out already.

I also realized that, if they had turned at the initial battle and kept fighting... Strahd's army would have just killed them again. Like.

I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. If they don't die again, what do the revenants do? Strahd's not just going to let these guys wander around, right? And it's pretty vital to the plot that Strahd's army did, in fact, win. They could not be locked in combat forever.

Do they play dead? That seems absurd for a revenant bent on revenge. If nothing else, the consensus on medieval battles seems to be that the living would loot the field of anything valuable (armor, weapens, clothing, even the raw metal of broken eqipment) and then pile the bodies into a large burial pit. I could not be convinced that a revenant would just lay down through all that.

So this is what I came up with for them, because I read that thing about the burial pit and went OH MY GOD...

It took about 24 hours for Strahd to fully become a vampire (you could say it took that long because he hadn't killed Sergei yet, but he had already been spared from death by consuming Alek's blood and was already well on his way to full-fledged vampirism by the time he enacted that part of the plan).

If we use that as a precedent for the turning process, revenants could take that long (or longer; as long as we need it to) to return to their bodies and become fully-realized revenants. It could take a long time for their spirits to be shunted toward the astral plane, break free, and return to animate their corpses.

Anyway. Do you see where I'm going with this? It's not good.

Argynvost has fallen. The knights of the Order are dead. Vladimir's vengeful spirit rages against the natural forces pulling him toward the Astral Plane, and he finally breaks free with such a force that other knights are able to follow him back through the tear in the veil to return to their bodies.

But in the meantime, the battlefield has been stripped. Equipment and other valuables gone. Half-dressed bodies thrown into a deep pit, tangled together, tens deep, heavy earth piled atop them. Rain beating it down into mud, packed tight into the crevices between them.

The revenants awake in this mass grave.

They have to dig themselves out. Gather new resources. Make plans.

Having fudged how long it takes for them to become revenants, and possibly when the timer on their revenge actually begins (after they finally claw their way to the surface?)—and maybe they're a fringe case anyway, I realized later, due to either dragon magic or shenanigans from being so near to the Amber Temple or some combination thereof?—and maybe the one-year thing doesn't even matter? Throw it out the window; I just need them to not get slaughtered by Strahd's guys before—By the time they are ready, the mists have finally closed around Barovia, three years after the Fall.

Madam Eva (who I have other ideas for, too—why? why make her Strahd's half-sister? what is that? stop giving him more siblings) meets the Order on their long-awaited march toward Castle Ravenloft, and tells them that Strahd is now trapped in a hell of his own making. Satisfied that Strahd will suffer in his new situation, Vladimir is determined to keep Strahd alive to experience all of the worst this new domain has to offer.

So. That's what I have.

TL;DR - It's the same but different.

[nessietessimalnua]

FILM LANGUAGE - Notes

06/11/17

Continuity Editing

Match cut - cut on shape                   - cut on action  Jump cut - used in montages; a cut without continuity  Motivated cut 

Types of Sequence 

Montage

Parallel sequence 

Shot order 

Montage: A technique of selecting, editing and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole. - Wikipedia 

Team America - Montage 

 - Narrative led   - Music led

Graphical cut - a visual element carried over from each shot

Match move - Movement of a character or element that’s carried over

Sound bridge - Audio elements that carry over into the nest shot 

Citizen Kane - Graphical cuts

Paper Man - Match move

In Animation, you ‘edit the film before filming’