Creative Transitions
- Thread starter lou1492
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MikeWilkinson
Veteran
Personally, I am a huge fan of transitions that are partly (or fully) created by the cinematography at the end of a scene/start of the next scene. From as simple as someone walking past the front of the lens and using that as a wipe, to more advanced tricks a la Michel Gondry. Right now I'm working on a series of match cuts in my next video. I feel like transitions like these add so much more flow to a piece.
Outside of that I adhere to the 90-9-1 rule; 90% use cuts, 9% use dissolves, 1% use wipes. Obviously George Lucas does not abide by these rules
Outside of that I adhere to the 90-9-1 rule; 90% use cuts, 9% use dissolves, 1% use wipes. Obviously George Lucas does not abide by these rules
If you want to see a flick with alot of creative transitions, then check out The Butterfly Effect!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289879/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289879/
Daniel Alexander
Active member
regarding the transitions where the cinematographer uses a person/object passing the scene to create a wipe effect, how do they the blend the 2 clips together to make it seamless? The only way i can think of is creating a matte in post and keyframing as the subject moved in order to reveal an underlying clip but surely that would take for ever and be hard to make clean and precise?
MikeWilkinson
Veteran
Yes and maybe. An animated mask in After Effects took me about 10 minutes of keyframing work. No big deal.
utopeya
Member
That's one way to do it. A lower-tech way that has been used forever and is still quite effective is to have someone walk in front of the camera close enough to "wipe" (i.e. black out) the entire frame, then have the person do the exact same thing at the beginning of the next scene. Cut when the frame is being "wiped," and there you have it.
Hitchcock does this all the time. He did it several times (sometimes elegantly, sometimes less so) in ROPE in order to make the separate 10-minute reels of film look like they were a single take. There's one in FRENZY as well, where he has a guy walking across the frame with a sack of potatoes, and as the guy walks across, he cuts from a studio set to an actual location. The backgrounds of the two shots (an apartment stairwell) really don't match at all, but you won't notice it unless you're looking for it. (I didn't.)
As others have said, lots of nice transitions make use of cinematography and framing. Someone's looking at a newspaper. Now cut to a closeup of a newspaper, and track back to reveal that you're now at a different location, and a totally different person is looking at a totally different newspaper. Or have someone standing at a certain position in the frame, then dissolve to a different scene in a different location, with a different person standing in exactly the same place in the frame. There's a particularly nice one of these in MILLER'S CROSSING. Gabriel Byrne is standing in the woods, after having just let Jon Turturro (whom he was supposed to kill) run away. Dissolve to the two gangsters who are waiting for Byrne back at the car, standing in exactly the same place in the frame where Byrne was standing.
David W. Jones
Veteran
The majority of the stuff I do are broadcast commercials where a producer will always want some cheesy zoom shot and really bad transition in post.
That being said, IMO if you can't tell a story with cuts, you can't tell a story.
Al the Best!
Dave
That being said, IMO if you can't tell a story with cuts, you can't tell a story.
Al the Best!
Dave