Does this have a name?

[conuly]

There's a thing they do sometimes on tv and in the movies when transitioning from one scene to another. In the first scene you maybe have somebody putting a kid to bed while making sad faces about the state of the world, and in the next you move to a war zone or something, so they start the sound of the helicopter or the gunshots or the shouting a second or two before the image moves over from "bedtime" to "war".

Or sometimes they do it the other way around, I guess.

Does this have a name, and what's it called?

Comments

[elayna]

A sound bridge, which can be a dialogue bridge, sound effect bridge, or music bridge.

[alexseanchai]

J-cuts and L-cuts!

[readerjane]

...and at the end of the episode, if you're still hearing non-musical sounds after the screen goes to black, that's a flentl. In their West Wing Weekly podcast, Josh Molina and Hrishi Hirway coined the term "frontl" for the opposite -- a non-musical sound at the beginning before the visuals appear. I don't know whether frontl is in common use, though.

[fox]

They coined "flentl" as well.

[conuly]

But what's the etymology? Or did they just look at a bowl of alphabet soup and go "Yup, that's what we're calling it"?

[fox]

The etymology of "flentl"? I think Malina said "that kind of sound cue ought to have a name. Something like 'flentl.'" Sounds like it could be Yiddish (a language he may speak himself, though if not, he's certainly said his father is fluent in it), something he made up. If I could remember which episode of the podcast it was I could point you to the transcript where they introduce it, but it is simply a made-up thing. :-)

A frontl is a flentl at the beginning of an episode, of course. "front" plus the -l, er, suffix.