Sequential Imagery: Scene Transitions

Scene transitions are an important element in insuring the narrative of your film flows. In most films and Animation Directors will typically follow the tried and true formula of simply cutting from one scene, to an establishing shot setting up the following scene and go from there. While this is functional, there is an often overlooked art to the transition of a scene. Directors such as Edgar Wright, Satoshi Kon and Michel Gondry, all known visual storytellers use techniques such as match cuts, whip-pans and making use of negative space, to transition between scenes.

Match cuts are often used by directors to draw a parallel between two images. Probably the most famous example of a match cut being used to transition between scenes is in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 'A Space Odyssey' when the neanderthal uses a bone as a tool for the first time before throwing it into the air. The camera follows the bone as it rises and falls in slow motion before cutting mid-air to a similarly shaped space station thousands of years later, an editing choice mean't to symbolise man's advancement in our use of tools and the progress we've made technologically.

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director Michel Gondry whose background in Music videos gives him level of literacy in this area of Visual Language, stages a lot of the scenes almost as if they were a stage production, with our character shifting from one background to another with almost dreamlike grace. One scene depicts Jim Carrey's character leaving a scene while the lights in the room go off one by one, before he walks thorough a doorway into another scene entirely, symbolising the character's despair in giving up. These transitions, while they may seem flashy, in most cases have some sort of thematic reasoning for their inclusion and are always motivated by some directorial decision.