Fade In / Fade Out

The image rises out of a solid colour or sinks back into it. Nothing shares the frame, so the effect reads as a beginning or an ending rather than as a link.

It is the strongest punctuation a film has. A fade to black closes a chapter, and an audience will accept almost any jump in time or place on the other side of one.

Direction and colour are the two decisions. Fade in to open, fade out to close, and the colour underneath changes the meaning completely. Black reads as an ending, white reads as a blank or an overexposure, and a colour reads as a mood held for a beat.

Length carries weight. Half a second is a breath. Three seconds is a chapter break, and the audience will feel the film has stopped.

It is an opacity ramp against a solid, applied in an edit. Render the shot, then ramp it to or from the colour you have chosen. A prompt asking a model to fade usually returns a shot that gets dark, which is a lighting change rather than a transition.

Use it to open a film, to close one, and to end an act. Use it inside a film sparingly, where a scene has genuinely finished.

Avoid it between two shots that belong to the same moment. A fade separates, so it works against any sequence trying to build.

A dissolve overlaps two images and both are on screen together. A fade passes through a solid, so there is a moment when the screen holds no picture at all.

An iris also closes the frame down, and it closes toward a point that the film chooses. A fade dims the whole frame evenly and points at nothing.

Ingmar Bergman and Sven Nykvist fade to red rather than black between scenes in Cries and Whispers (1972), and the choice of colour turns each transition into part of the film's argument. Sam Mendes uses a single fade to black in the middle of 1917 (2019), the one place where the film gives up its apparently unbroken take.

The model dims the lights in the shot instead of fading the picture. That is a lighting change, and the frame still holds an image at the end of it. Render the shot normally and ramp its opacity in the edit.

The second failure is a fade with no stated colour or direction. Say fade in from black or fade out to white, because the two read as opposite things and the default is rarely what you meant.