Jump Cuts – Why Would You Use Them in Your Films?

MZed Education

by Mascha Deikova15 days ago

Most of the time, when we edit our films, we don’t want the audience to notice the cuts. That’s called continuity editing – one shot follows the next smoothly and seamlessly, without pulling the viewers out of the story. But there are moments when breaking that rule serves a purpose. And when it’s done well, it can be just as powerful. For instance, by deliberately placing visible jump cuts into your scene. What are they, and what impact can they create? Let’s find out.

In our era of YouTube tutorials and talking heads in Instagram reels, jump cuts have become something mundane. Creators use them for practical reasons: to omit unnecessary parts of content and avoid setting up a second camera angle for the sake of the edit. While we got used to this application of jump cuts, it doesn’t mean they have lost their craft of storytelling in modern cinema and videos. So here we are, unlocking it again!

Jump cuts in a nutshell

In our latest MZed course, “Get Me Started with Adobe Premiere Pro,” filmmaker and educator Digby Hogan introduces jump cuts as an editing tool to shorten long action by inserting jumps in time. As he says, it’s helpful when you want to move through a longer piece of content, but still catch little snippets along the way. That is what jump cuts are at their original core – a montage technique for compressing time.

As you probably know (or can see in the course), this technique is pretty simple to execute. You take a Razor tool in Premiere Pro (or a similar one in the NLE software of your choice), select a segment in the middle of a shot (or multiple ones), and remove it (or them). Then, you glue the edges of the remaining parts together, and all set! The shorter the remaining parts, the bigger the jump cuts in between them. Hit replay now. How does it feel?

Disjointed, abrupt, in-your-face. Jump cuts often bring a new rhythm and energy to the scene, even if it is just a simple car drive. They are also clearly visible, revealing the artificial nature of the film to the viewers. No wonder that the legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (as well as other French New Wave artists) loved this technique for its stylistic and expressionistic qualities, and popularized it in the 1960s.

A brief history of jump cuts

So, yes, jump cuts are not a new technology, by any means. The story goes that another French film innovator, Georges Méliès, invented it accidentally. He was filming on a street when a bus drove by, and the camera suddenly jammed. Georges cleared the jam and started recording again. Another vehicle – a hearse – appeared in the same position. This coincidence provided a curious insight. When he replayed the film, the unplanned cut created an illusion that the bus magically transformed into a hearse. Méliès was stunned by his discovery of filmic jumps in time and used this new technique in his famous trick films, ages before VFX artists became a profession.

The 30-degree rule

The effect of jump cuts doesn’t rely on magic, though. On the contrary, it has a simple physiological explanation for why we always see them.

One of the well-known visual conventions in filmmaking is known as the 30-degree rule. Filmmaker and educator Kyle Wilamowski defines it in the MZed-course “Fundamentals of Directing” like this:

The 30-degree rule is a basic film guideline that states the camera should move at least 30 degrees between shots of the same subject occurring in succession.

Simply put, if you want to cut to another shot in a scene but keep the same shot size, the angle difference between camera position A and camera position B should be at least 30 degrees. If it’s not, then the change will not be substantial enough to our eye, and we will experience it as a jump cut in action, and not as a different point of view on a continuous event.

Jump cuts as a stylistic choice

So, we established that jump cuts are visible to the audience’s eye and feel like compressed time. They also throw us out of the story for a moment and draw our attention to the technique beneath. Does it mean that jump cuts are always disruptive and punchy, though?

No. Of course, that’s one part of their craft, and some filmmakers love them exactly for the heightened style they create (Guy Ritchie among them, for example). At the same time, jump cuts can also fill a scene with a poetic vibe, because they do not feel realistic. Imagine that you daydream, or go through some beautiful memories in your mind. We cannot jump through time in real life, but we do many such leaps in our heads, don’t we?

This is an example from Terrence Malick’s thoughtful masterpiece “The Tree of Life.” We experience the story in film through memories of the past, so it’s only natural that some scenes feel more fragmented and impressionistic than logical and linear. Thus, jump cuts become an organic medium to tell this story, and they don’t feel abrupt or disturbing. On the contrary, they feel just right (at least, to me).

Storytelling through jump cuts

As you see, jump cuts are able to tell various stories. And, of course, they can be made in just a quick decision in the editing room. However, more often than not, filmmakers know exactly why they want to use this technique and plan complex choreographies in advance. Often, editors create just the mere appearance of a jump cut by cutting together two separate shots, where the camera composition and the shot size don’t differ from each other. Whenever jump cuts are used intentionally to carry the story, they become the result of meticulous pre-production.

Let’s take as an example the following scene from “Schindler’s List” by Steven Spielberg (from 01:12). Oscar Schindler interviews candidates who are about to become his new secretary. The camera stays in the same position and films the entire scene from the same angle. The thing that changes are the women behind the typewriter, the background reconstruction process (to show the passing of time), and also – the most important element – the performance of the main actor, whose body language tells us everything we need to know. Beautiful piece of storytelling, where no words are needed.

Jump cuts for an emotional impact

Another effect that this technique can create on us, the viewers, is to help us get into the mind of a character and support the emotions in acting. Due to the “jumpy” nature of a jump cut (sorry for the pun), this tool mostly helps in frantic scenes, where someone is panicked or stressed. A great example is the following monologue by Leonardo DiCaprio in “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood:”

What feelings and reactions did the jump cuts evoke in you here? What did they suggest about the character’s state of mind? That he is agitated, talking to himself, unable to concentrate, jumping from one conclusion to another, his thoughts spinning out of control. It’s unsettling, isn’t it?

At the same time, a jump cut can be very small and subtle – introduced only once in a scene and with just a few frames missing – but the impact could be crushing anyway. For instance, here, in a scene from “Dune: Part One,” where Paul snaps back to reality from his spice-induced vision (starting at 03:14):

Morphs as an alternative to jump cuts

What jump cuts cannot do (and shouldn’t, to be honest) is seamlessly speed up an actor’s performance by masking long pauses or small, ill-suited reactions in the acting. For that, we sometimes need the so-called opticals – little, simple effects, such as blow-ups, reframes, speed changes, screen flops, and morphs.

However, as renowned editor Tom Cross reminds us in his MZed course “The Art and Technique of Film Editing,” these effects are to be used with extreme caution, and purposefully, not randomly. Especially when we talk about morphs, which are the seamless and invisible way of blending two images together, precision is the core point here – the audience shouldn’t notice the effect.

That’s what makes morphs particularly difficult. Why? Because when we have a close-up, the face invites us to look at the details. You can witness this effect yourself when you flip the screen direction of a shot. Some actors become completely grotesque (Ryan Gosling in “The First Man,” in Tom’s example) and even unrecognizable. So if you need to make a morph on a close-up, you should be really careful, and better get some help from VFX artists. In Tom Cross’s words, sometimes they won’t be able to do what you want them to, but they may have a different solution to your problem.

Your favorite jump cuts

So, yes, jump cuts are not just a lazy way of editing mistakes in YouTube tutorials. They can be much more: passing time, a stylistic choice, added energy, heightened emotional state, a punchy expressionistic technique, dreamy and unrealistic memories, and a tool to create a magical transition between realities. That is, if they are used with intention and with understanding, what craft they can hold.

And what is your favorite way to use jump cuts? Do you have any other great film examples in mind that reveal their storytelling powers? Let’s talk more in the comments below!

Feature image source:  film stills from “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” by Quentin Tarantino, 2019.

Full disclosure: MZed is owned by CineD.