Scene Change Transition Cues

Music can help a lot to smoothen rough transitions between scenes. Particularly scene transitions that change location and time can often feel very rough. Having music cues over such scene changes that deliberately de-emphasize the transition (=not placing any downbeats/hitpoints on the actual cut and being rather unobtrusive in general) can help tremendously to smoothen it.

The most elegant way in such cases is to extend any music cue that you have for other reasons in that scene over the scene change and let it end afterwards (or if needed continue in the next scene). Also, of course starting before the scene change and continue into score that is needed in the scene after the transition is possible. However in such cases it is a little trickier as you still should try to avoid to create the feeling that a music cue starts out of the blue.

If there are no music cues before or after the change and it still feels like the transition is too hard, it might be a good idea to actually have a short cue that only serves the function of making the transition smoother. Again, try to place the start and end point of this cue to moments that don’t feel unnatural or forced.