Star Wars: The Last Jedi Will Cool It With the Wipe Transitions Says Rian Johnson

Rian Johnson took to Twitter to reveal that Star Wars: The Last Jedi will only have a dozen wipe transitions which up until now were common place in Star Wars movies, barring Rogue One.

If you’ve watched any of the Star Wars movies, then you would have become accustomed to see what are known as wipe transitions. George Lucas was a big advocate of them and used them an awful lot – some may say too much. The only film in the Star Wars cinematic universe that opted not to use them was Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One, and that probably had to do with the fact that it’s a spinoff movie. However, turns out that Rian Johnson wants to move away from the editing technique as well.

Rian Johnson himself sparked this conversation about Star Wars wipe transitions in a Twitter poll in which he asked the question, “Just off the top of your head, which movie would you guess has the most wipe transitions?” The possible answers were A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and The Force Awakens. Empire won the poll, and Johnson later revealed in a later tweet that it was indeed the correct answer with a grand score of 42 wipe transitions. A New Hope had 31 and The Force Awakens 14 (thank God).

However, he followed this up with yet another tweet that revealed that Star Wars: The Phantom Menace featured the most wipe transitions with a staggering 55. He then stated in the same tweet that his movie will only feature what he referred to as “a measly 12”. In all honesty, this move away from wipe transitions can only be seen as a good thing since they are a lazy form of editing. They have however become synonymous with the Star Wars franchise which is probably one of the reasons why so few filmmakers decide to use them.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be in UK cinemas on December 15th, 2017.

What do you think of this move away from wipe transitions? Let us know in the comments below.




There are no comments

Add yours

Have your say...