Thursday, November 11, 2004

CRAFTY WRITER'S TOOL: TIME CUT

This one's extremely basic, and it should be obvious. But maybe it's not.

Every time you cut, you can jump ahead in time.

That means that pretty much every time you have something boring that logically happens next in your scene, you want to look for an excuse to cut away, then come back to the scene after the boring stuff is over, whether it's a jump of an hour, a day, or two minutes.

You can do this narratively, by jumping to another story line, or you can do it cinematically, just by cutting outside the house where the conversation is taking place. I was just doing it by doing a "FLASH TO:" mini-flashback; though the flashback is exactly one line long, it gives me an excuse to cut out an entire explanation that the audience doesn't need.

4:37 PM

1 Comments:

Cuts like that seem obvious to us now because we've seen them so often; if you watch some of the first movies you'll find they didn't use those cuts and they end up covering everything said and done by the characters, no matter how irrelevant it is to the movie. And that's one reason I avoid those old movies.

--Jeff

By  Anonymous, at 6:48 PM  

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