A transition is a right-aligned line in caps telling the reader how one scene becomes the next. The default transition in film is a straight cut, which means CUT TO: describes what was going to happen anyway. In a modern spec script you can leave nearly all of them out, and most professional writers do.
INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT
Sarah turns off the light.
CUT TO:
EXT. STREET - DAY
Delete that CUT TO: and nothing whatsoever changes. The new slugline already told us we cut.
Why they exist at all
They are a leftover from a real technical need.
In the era when a shooting script was a working document passed between the director, the editor, and the lab, transitions were instructions. A dissolve was a physical optical process that cost money and had to be planned. Someone had to know which ones to order. Marking them in the script was how that happened.
Reading old published screenplays gives a misleading impression, because what gets published is often the shooting script or a transcript of the finished film, not the draft that got someone hired. So beginners copy a convention from a document that had a completely different purpose, and end up with CUT TO: on every page of a script whose only job is to be an enjoyable read.
What each one means
CUT TO: An instantaneous change. The default. Almost never needs writing.
DISSOLVE TO: One image fades into the next while both are briefly visible. Conventionally signals a passage of time, or a soft association between two things.
FADE IN: The screen goes from black to picture. Traditionally the first line of a screenplay.
FADE OUT. The screen goes to black. Traditionally the last line, sometimes with THE END after it.
FADE TO BLACK. Same as fade out, used mid-script to mark a hard break, often between acts.
SMASH CUT TO: An abrupt, jarring cut, usually from quiet to loud or calm to chaos. It has no technical meaning at all; it is a straight cut with an instruction about tone.
MATCH CUT TO: A cut where a shape, movement or composition in the outgoing shot lines up with the incoming one. The famous ones are famous because the match is the idea.
INTERCUT: Not really a transition. It tells the reader that two locations will be cut between repeatedly, which saves writing a slugline for every alternation. Covered in the post on extensions.
TIME CUT: Used occasionally to signal a jump forward within the same location. Some writers like it; it is not universal.
The rule that makes this simple
Use a transition when the transition is the storytelling. Leave it out when it is punctuation.
That single test resolves nearly every case.
- A cut from a scene in a kitchen to a scene in a street: punctuation. Leave it out.
- A cut from a spinning coin to a spinning planet: the match is the point. Write MATCH CUT TO:.
- A cut from a whispered conversation to a factory floor at full volume, where the shock is the joke: write SMASH CUT TO:.
- Dissolving through three seasons to show a year passing: the dissolve carries the meaning. Write it.
If deleting the transition would not change how the film plays in the reader's head, it was punctuation.
Nothing about the story, and quite a lot about the writer. It is the single most reliable surface tell that someone learned formatting from published shooting scripts rather than from spec scripts. Readers notice it in the first thirty seconds, before they have formed any opinion about the writing. That is an unnecessary thing to spend a first impression on, and it takes one find-and-replace to fix.
Format
If you are using one:
- Right aligned, roughly at the right margin.
- All caps.
- Ends with a colon, except FADE OUT. which conventionally takes a full stop, because nothing follows it.
- Sits on its own line with a blank line either side.
FADE IN: is the exception to the right-alignment convention: it goes at the left margin, as the first line of the script.
Your screenwriting software handles all of this. If you are formatting by hand, this is a good argument for not formatting by hand.
Spec script versus shooting script
Worth being explicit, because this is the source of the contradictory advice.
A spec script is written to be read: by a producer, a competition reader, an actor's agent. Its job is to make someone see the film and want to make it. Anything that slows a reader down is working against it, and technical instructions the reader does not need are exactly that. Keep transitions to the ones that carry meaning.
A shooting script is a production document. It is numbered, it is locked, and it goes to every department. Here, transitions that the director actually intends may well be marked, because the document has stopped being a sample and started being a plan. This is also where scene numbers, and sometimes camera directions, become appropriate.
You will write the first kind for years before you write the second. Write for the reader you have.
Do you need FADE IN and FADE OUT?
Convention says a screenplay opens with FADE IN: and closes with FADE OUT. It is traditional, it is harmless, and roughly half of contemporary scripts do it.
Nobody will hold either choice against you. What does read oddly is FADE IN: on page one followed by three more fades scattered through the script for no reason, since a fade is a strong mark and using it casually spends it.
The practical pass
Open your draft and search for "CUT TO".
For each hit, ask the one question: does deleting this change how the film plays? Delete every one where the answer is no. On a first feature draft, this typically removes between forty and eighty lines and the script gets faster immediately, because you have taken out a right-aligned interruption between every scene.
Then look at what survived. Usually two or three transitions remain, each doing something specific. That is roughly the right number, and now they will actually be noticed.
Next
We have covered the page. Next: the document people build before the page, and the argument about whether you need one at all.
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