The Film & Video Institute
The Subtlety of Barn Doors
Jim Closs
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The Film & Video Institute |
The Subtlety of Barn Doors Jim Closs |
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On the subtlety of Barn DoorsNo - this is not about barn doors on farms! It's the 'Barn Doors' you might find under the Transitions section of your video editing software. Transitions in videos are effects that we all need when we want to fade from one scene into another rather than use a simple cut. I suspect most film makers stick to a simple 'dissolve' or 'cross dissolve' - the names of these transitions seem to vary from one package to another. Today's video editing software offers a wide range of alternative transitions - such as page turns, peels, fly aways - and so on. Some folk like to play with these in their films but I confess that I belong to the school of thought that sees many of these transitions as intrusions which tend to distract the mind of the audience from a film rather than draw them into it. The basic reason for using a transition is to indicate some form of discontinuity in the story. If the action is continuous but seen from different camera angles, then simple cuts are all that are required. But if the action changes to either a different time or a different place, then it is no longer continuous - especially in the mind of the viewer. This is when a transition is required and the simple dissolve will fit most such occasions. But there can be exceptions and one I have come across is what prompted this article. Dissolves, like most transitions, work well when the 'before' and 'after' images are significantly different. Man jumps into taxi, taxi drives off, man arrives at hotel. A dissolve between the taxi driving off and the man's arrival at the hotel is enough to let the audience know that it took some time for him to get there. But here the taxi and hotel arrival images are very different. If the two images are very similar - almost identical - this convention doesn't work as well. I came across this problem several years ago in a project for a fund raising video which involved interviews with parents of children with special needs. I transcribed the interviews and selected the clips to be used to tell their story and, of course, these came from different time points in the interviews. So although the interviewees were in the same basic seated position, their head movements and shoulder movements obviously varied throughout the interview. Assembling clips with simple cuts led to obvious jump cuts. To get round this I used the normal dissolve but found that this was very unsatisfactory. The same person was in the 'same' position and apparently just continuing talking - and this weird dissolve effect interrupted the video image while the voice continued without any apparent interruption. The best option would have been to use cutaways but unless these can be chosen to be obviously relevant to what the interviewee is talking about they can stand out like a sore thumb. I experimented with other transitions and opted for a 'page turn' - which seemed unobtrusive to me but when the audience of parents saw the film they asked "What was that?" Later I revisited the problem and, under the 'Wipe' class of effects, found the Barn Doors option. This, in my software (Adobe Premiere Pro CS3), consists of two thin vertical lines which 'wipe' out to left and right from the centre of the image. The speed at which they do this is controllable. Where the before and after images are very different, the transition is glaringly obvious - more so than a dissolve. But where they are almost identical - as in the interviews - surprisingly, the result is quite subtle. The background stays exactly the same and the slight head movements are softened by the wipe effect, not jarring as they would in a cut. I can recommend trying this transition in any similar situation where the before and after images are very similar. I have used it to good effect in a number of projects. But I got caught out recently in a project which involved six different interviews, each of which needed such transitions at several points. I was so confident in my Barn Doors effect that I overdid it! So the audience became all too aware of it - thus spoiling the effect. I replaced half the Barn Doors with relevant cutaways and all was well. So Barn Doors can give you a subtle transition for situations like the above, as long as you don't overdo them as I did. Jim Closs Jim has provided some footage of two interviews to illustrate the effects described above.. The same sequence is presented at first with a jump cut, then a dissolve and finally with the Barn Doors transition. Running time: 1 min 30 secs |