Here is a great example of an L Cut from David Fincher’s Fight Club where Tyler recites the rules as various characters ready themselves to fight. So, t he audience is is looking at clip B but still hearing audio from clip A. What L Cut means is that you are hearing the audio from the previous shot, even though we’ve moved on to another shot. This editing technique is used not only by narrative filmmakers, but is also a favorite of documentary filmmakers and commercial videographers. In order to really grasp this type of editing technique, here is a fantastic resource from Vimeo Video School on the Understanding of Jump Cuts.įirst, let’s talk about the L Cut. This allows you to jump from one angle to the other without it being jarring for the audience. It obviously gained traction and is one of the most used types of cuts today next to the hard cut.Īnother great place to use jump cuts is during an interview, especially if you film the interview with multiple cameras. In this very early version of the jump cut, contemporary audiences were introduced to a new way of time passage in film. We see an early version of this technique in Eisenstein‘s Battleship Potemkin, where the battleship fires a mortar round and we watch the destruction as various angles jump cut from one to another. The jump cut is a technique which allows the editor to jump forward in time. To give you a quick overview of the history of cutting, here is a great video from Filmmaker IQ. The only down side of the hard cut is that (out of all the cuts we’ll talk about) this one gives the least amount of visual meaning. This type of cut is utilized when you want to cut from clip to clip without any type of transition, or where you cut from the end of one clip to the beginning of another. The hard cut is the basic type of cut in editing. For said examples, we’ll be using excerpts from various films - but keep in mind that you can use these same cuts in any editing session, be it narrative, documentary, commercial, industrial, or even animation. Let’s go through eight of these and look at some examples of each. If your goal is to master the art of editing, you’re going to need to know the essential cuts to use when editing a film or video. These essential cuts will help any editor transform their footage into a gripping, solid narrative.