The cut is a basic form of continuity editing and can be used in a variety of different ways across all types of media as a way of moving from one scene to another.
Compare Scene Transition.
Tropes:
- Age Cut: A cut to a character several ages older.
- Ambulance Cut: A sudden cut to a character in the hospital or on an ambulance to such.
- Answer Cut: A character asks a question, and the next scene shows the answer.
- Anti Climax Cut: The next scene is building up to be really exciting and interesting...but then it instantly cuts to the buildup having no payoff.
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: The camera focuses on a small, unimportant object during a scene, usually to emphasize or symbolize something.
- Body Wipe: Part of someone's body fills the screen and dissolves/cuts to the next scene.
- Charge-into-Combat Cut: A fight scene is about to start, only for it to cut to something else entirely to break the tension.
- Conversation Cut: Cutting to another scene in the middle of a conversation, as if no time had passed inbetween one scene and the other.
- Cut Apart: A cutaway reveals a Switching P.O.V. wasn't about the same situation.
- Cutaway Gag: A character mentions an unseen past event or a hypothetical situation. After that, a brief scene is shown depicting what the character was talking about.
- Cutting Back to Reality: A hallucination or fantasy is witnessed—only for a cut to reveal what's actually happening.
- Description Cut: A character mentions someone will do something, and the next scene shows them doing the complete opposite.
- Distant Reaction Shot: Cutting to somewhere further away as something is happening, possibly to emphasize how big and grand it is.
- Exposition Cut: Cutting to the aftermath of an Info Dump to save time.
- Flashback Cut: Instead of an actual flashback, a brief cut shows what happened, then instantly cuts right back to the present scene.
- Funeral Cut: A character is in a life-threatening situation, only to cut to their tombstone (or the other characters attending their funeral).
- Gilligan Cut: A character refuses to do something and the next scene shows them doing exactly what they said they wouldn't do.
- Hard Cut: The most basic cut out there: one scene immediately cuts to the other, with no transition inbetween.
- "I Know What We Can Do" Cut: A character gets an idea, then it cuts to them carrying the idea out.
- Ironic Echo Cut: Someone addresses a subject, and the scene cuts to someone else addressing the same subject in another manner.
- Jump Cut: Instantly cutting from one shot to another, very similar one.
- Match Cut: The scene cuts/dissolves to a similarly displayed lifeform or object.
- Multi-Take Cut: The exact same action filmed from various angles then edited together with Jump Cuts.
- Next Thing They Knew: A couple goes from flirting with each other to having sex over the course of two shots.
- Reaction Shot: Character says or does something and the camera cuts away to another character to show them react.
- Relax-o-Vision: A form of censorship where disturbing scenes are replaced with footage of something more pleasant.
- Repeat Cut: The same action, line, or brief exchange is shown more than once in immediate repetition.
- Smash Cut: An abrupt cut from one scene to the next.
- Smash to Black: Instantly cutting to black at the end of a scene.
- Sneeze Cut: Someone is talking/thinking about someone else; cut to said person sneezing. A common anime trope.
- Stop Trick: Shooting a scene, changing something in it, then shooting another one; this gives the illusion that a dramatic change has happened in the blink of an eye.
- Switching P.O.V.: A scene cuts from one character's perspective to another's.
- Twisted Echo Cut: The conversation cuts to another just like it, though related to something else.
- Two Scenes, One Dialogue: Cut between two or more characters talking about the same thing.
