Scriptnotes · John August and Craig Mazin

89 - Writing effective transitions (Encore)

April 6, 2026·1 hr 5 min·4 clips

A listener says an early episode on transitions was the missing key that cracked their story and landed them at Sundance.

John opens with housekeeping. Craig is away on show work, John is finishing WGA negotiations, and Drew guides the audience into an encore instead of a new recording. The replay has a clear reason. Kellen wrote that the old transitions conversation changed how he thought about writing and helped him crack a script that later reached Sundance. So that is the agenda. Not a list of rules for clever cuts, exactly, but a close look at why one scene hands off to the next and why that handoff sometimes goes dead. The wine bit stays. So does the Scriptnotes rhythm: dry aside, quick laugh, then straight back to the craft problem. The excerpt settles on visual fatigue. Moving clouds can work when they belong to a bigger idea, but as a default bridge they start to feel less like story and more like waiting. Then comes the long walk. A character trudges toward the camera, the credits roll, and the audience slowly understands that the shot plans to make them watch every step. Sometimes that earns its keep. John and Craig are careful there, because a walk-and-talk or steadicam move can hold the screen when the scene keeps changing underneath it. Goodfellas gets the pass. The joke is not that long shots are bad. The point is that most long shots are not Martin Scorsese at full strength. Another image takes a hit too: the alienated girl in a car, hand drifting in the highway air. It has been used so often that it now needs real dramatic pressure behind it. The closing slips back into banter. Drew and John talk Olympics excitement, fair criticisms of the Olympics, and the plain truth that enthusiasm and concern can sit in the same conversation.

As heard by us

A grounded craft lesson on when a transition earns its keep.

This episode returns to Scriptnotes episode 89 from May 2013 and treats transitions as a craft problem, not a bit of decoration. John and Craig keep testing the same visual moves - clouds drifting, a long shot of someone walking toward camera, a teen in the passenger seat with…

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Why you'd press play

When your scene needs the cut to do actual work.

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