Continuity editing

A system of film editing that preserves clear spatial and temporal relationships across cuts, helping viewers follow action without noticing the construction.

180-degree rule: A staging convention that keeps the camera on one side of an axis of action to preserve screen direction. It prevents characters from appearing to switch sides across a cut.
Film editing: The selection and arrangement of moving-image and sound material into a finished sequence. Continuity editing is one system within this broader practice.
Classical Hollywood cinema: A filmmaking tradition whose style favors clear storytelling, continuity, and largely unobtrusive technique. Its conventions standardized continuity editing as a dominant approach.
Soviet montage: A film theory and practice that creates meaning through the collision and arrangement of shots. It can foreground discontinuity and intellectual association rather than seamless action.
Shot reverse shot: An editing pattern that alternates views of participants, often during a conversation. Its matching views depend on stable screen positions and eyelines.
Shot (filmmaking): An uninterrupted sequence of images recorded by a camera between starts and stops. Continuity is constructed by relating one shot to another.
The Great Train Robbery: A 1903 American silent film directed by Edwin S. Porter, combining staged action with location footage and parallel events. Its editing helped demonstrate how separate shots could construct connected action.
Jump cut: A cut between similar views that creates an abrupt jump in time or subject position. It makes temporal or spatial discontinuity conspicuous.
Eyeline match: A cut connecting a character's look with the object or person they appear to see. It links separate shots into a coherent act of looking.
Scene (film): A unit of a film depicting an action or event in a particular time and place. Continuity editing commonly makes a scene's separate shots feel like one event.

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