A Slice of Life

Credit to Unity Documentation

The process of editing itself requires organizing and merging multiple pictures, actions, and events into a completed end project. Cuts produce noticeable and spontaneous changes between scenes.

Parallel editing describes the merging of two or more separate events to make a logical sense of cause and effect. Cutaways are used often to make the viewer’s attention shift elsewhere away from the main action as it happens offscreen and not in the normal time and space that had been previously established.

Jump cuts create fast changes in the placement or movements of the elements on the screen, releasing them from the structure of continuous time. Transitions, in general, allow for changes that occur over time between scenes or events on screen.

Fades are popular among designers because they signify major changes in content, such as time, space or simply breaking the story’s continuity. Through camera motion, mobile framing gives light to different cuts and transitions that aren’t often used.

The pace that is chosen for a composition’s editing is decided based on the length of time the events occur on and offscreen and how the cuts/transitions are incorporated to link them all together. Factors such as these that help tell the tempo are event density and transition speed.

Varying a project’s tempo, altering the duration of events seen onscreen, or providing pauses can inevitably destroy the predictability to maintain the viewer’s interest. Techniques such as rhythmic editing can be added to give a sense of continuity or discontinuity, depending on the desired result.

How each element gets introduced into each frame, how long they stay in the frame when/how they leave, and the story’s beginning and conclusion must be carefully thought out.