What is a continuity error?

August 31, 2026 · updated August 31, 2026

A continuity error is a mismatch between how a script describes something in one scene and how it describes the same thing – the same set, the same time of day, the same physical detail – somewhere else. A character in a jacket that vanishes and reappears across a scene, a set named two different ways in two different sluglines, a scene marked DAY but written full of moonlight: all continuity errors, and all the kind that don’t surface until someone’s watching the cut and asking why the coffee cup moved.

Script-stage continuity errors – the ones worth catching before the schedule locks – tend to fall into a handful of categories: an INT/EXT that doesn’t match the scene’s action, a set referred to inconsistently, a time-of-day heading that contradicts its own description, a story day that doesn’t follow logically from the one before it, and plain notation mistakes in the heading itself. Some of these are objective – a time-of-day sequence either holds up or it doesn’t. Others are judgement calls – whether two scenes are really describing the same set under different names takes a human read, not just a rule.

Traditionally this is a script supervisor’s job, done by close reading and a well-kept continuity log. A continuity scan does the first pass at scale: a fast pass checks the objective, sequence-based issues, while a slower pass reads scene headings and action for the judgement-call categories, and flags every result against the scene it belongs to. Every flag is a suggestion, not a correction – confirm before applying, and treat a script-error catch as useful even when the flag itself turns out to be a false alarm.