Fading to white in a film rarely ends well for the characters involved. Either someone’s been knocked out or, worse, they’ve snuffed it.
And while those pearly hues make an easy transition if the next scene happens to be in heaven, in essence this is little more than an age-old cinematic trick designed to put the cinemagoer into a brief transient state.
In fact, we've become so immune to this effect that it’s only by watching a supercut of white fades in film back-to-back, like the one below, that we realise how strange and frequently used this fade is.
The video below comes from Vimeo genius Jacob T Swinney, he who recently laid the opening and closing shots of films side by side, and who now schools us in the art of film making once more.
You’ll be blinking for days.
