This mistake will cost you a reshoot

It’s 3am and I’m sitting on the couch with the laptop open.

We wrapped previz for Birds of Prey around 2am. My first ever on the job previz, back in 2019, and we’d been at it all day. No time to edit on the floor, so we tear down and everybody goes home.

Now I’m putting it together because it’s due first thing in the morning.

I’m trying to tie two shots together in the edit, and my stomach drops.

There’s no overlap in one of the shots.

We gotta reshoot this.

Except we can’t. Everyone went home hours ago.

The thing we missed is overlap.

Overlap means the last motion at the end of one take needs to repeat at the start of the next one. So in a fight context, if one character is punching another as the last beat of that shot before it cuts to change angles, then the first beat of the next shot needs to be that same punch repeated, before the choreography continues.

Now you might be thinking, why would we show the same punch twice?

The answer is, you don’t. But you need the motion to overlap, so that when you pick your edit point later, the action from the first shot seamlessly flows into the action of the second.

What happened to us is that we were all smoked and we forgot. One shot ended very energetically, and the next shot started standing still with the next beat continuing on action. Basically, there was no cut point that looked seamless.

Normally on previz this is a simple fix. You fire up the camera, walk back out onto the rehearsal floor and pick up the shot. But at 3am on the couch with an 8am deadline, I submitted something that didn’t feel finished.

It was just a concept, so it survived. But on a real shoot you aren’t going to have the luxury of editing in real time, and this is the difference between a sequence working flawlessly and an edit that looks jarring and staged.

The narrative version of this in a dramatic dialogue scene is making sure the performers are reasonably repeating the same blocking from one shot to the next. There’s nothing worse than trying to edit around someone who was fiddling with a prop in one shot, and is standing with their hands in their pockets in the next.

The takeaway is, overlap your action, and keep your actor blocking consistent. Even if you’re shooting by yourself and you’re the only one in frame.

I hope this helps,

Caleb