Wipe
Encyclopedia
A wipe is a type of film transition where one shot replaces another by travelling from one side of the frame to another or with a special shape.

George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...

 is famous for the sweeping use of wipes in his Star Wars
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...

films, which help evoke a kinship to old pulp science fiction novels and serials; he was inspired by a similar use of wipes by Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...

 (as can be seen in The Hidden Fortress
The Hidden Fortress
is a 1958 jidai-geki film directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring Toshirō Mifune as General and Misa Uehara as Princess Yuki. A literal translation of the Japanese title is The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress.-Plot:...

).

The very earliest examples of a wipe are seen as long ago as 1903 in films like Mary Jane's Mishap
Mary Jane's Mishap
Mary Jane's Mishap; or, Don't Fool with the Paraffin is a 1903 British short silent comedy film, directed by George Albert Smith, depicting Disaster follows when housemaid Mary Jane uses paraffin to light the kitchen stove...

 by George Albert Smith
George Albert Smith (inventor)
George Albert Smith was a stage hypnotist, psychic, magic lantern lecturer, astronomer, inventor, and one of the pioneers of British cinema, who is best known for his controversial work with Edmund Gurney at the Society for Psychical Research, his short-films from 1897-1903 which pioneered film...

.

Wipes can also be used as syntactic tools. Some examples are:
  • An iris wipe is a wipe that takes the shape of a growing or shrinking circle. It has been frequently used in animated
    Animation
    Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...

     short subject
    Short subject
    A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...

    s, such as those in the Looney Tunes
    Looney Tunes
    Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.'s first animated theatrical series. Since its first official release, 1930's Sinkin' in the Bathtub, the series has become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television...

    and Merrie Melodies
    Merrie Melodies
    Merrie Melodies is the name of a series of animated cartoons distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures between 1931 and 1969.Originally produced by Harman-Ising Pictures, Merrie Melodies were produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions from 1933 to 1944. Schlesinger sold his studio to Warner Bros. in 1944,...

    cartoon series, to signify the end of a story. When used in this manner, the iris wipe may be centered around a certain focal point and may be used as a device for a "parting shot" joke, a fourth wall
    Fourth wall
    The fourth wall is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play...

    -breaching wink by a character, or other purposes.
  • A star wipe is a wipe that takes the shape of a growing or shrinking star, and is used to impart a sense of "extra specialness" or "added value." An example of the "star wipe" can be seen in the Guiding Light
    Guiding Light
    Guiding Light is an American daytime television drama that is credited by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest running drama in television and radio history, running from 1937 until 2009...

    opening sequences of the 1980s. This convention was considered overused during that time period and is now generally thought to be somewhat out-of-date. The use was parodied in Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.
  • A heart wipe is a wipe that takes the shape of a growing or shrinking heart, and is used to impart a sense of "love" or "friendship." The heart wipe is still used in wedding, graduation, and bar mitzvah videos, among others, as it has now passed from stylistic into the realm of standard convention, though many people consider it tacky.
  • A matrix wipe is a patterned transition between two images. The matrix wipe can be various patterns such as a grid, stars, etc.
  • A clock wipe is a wipe that sweeps a radius around the center point of the frame to reveal the subsequent shot, like the sweeping hands of an analog clock
    Clock
    A clock is an instrument used to indicate, keep, and co-ordinate time. The word clock is derived ultimately from the Celtic words clagan and clocca meaning "bell". A silent instrument missing such a mechanism has traditionally been known as a timepiece...

    . Because of this similarity, it is often used to indicate that time has passed between the previous shot and the next shot.
  • The most common uses of the wipe effect is the "Invisible Wipe" where a camera follows a person into another room by tracking parallel to the actor. As the wall passes in front of the camera, the editor has the option of using a wipe to be able to choose any other matching take of the same scene. It is also commonly used in quick camera pans in action sequences, to make a cut invisible. Such wipes can be impossible to see in the finished film. A good example of this wipe can be seen in the movie Das Boot
    Das Boot
    Das Boot is a 1981 German epic war film written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, produced by Günter Rohrbach, and starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, and Klaus Wennemann...

     when director Wolfgang Petersen
    Wolfgang Petersen
    Wolfgang Petersen is a German film director and screenwriter. His films include The NeverEnding Story, Enemy Mine, Outbreak, In the Line of Fire, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm, Troy, and Poseidon...

     uses it to pan between two occupied u-boat
    U-boat
    U-boat is the anglicized version of the German word U-Boot , itself an abbreviation of Unterseeboot , and refers to military submarines operated by Germany, particularly in World War I and World War II...

     pens, even though they had only one u-boat for filming.
  • Some extremely effective (and expensive) wipes were used in the otherwise very low-budget Laurel and Hardy
    Laurel and Hardy
    Laurel and Hardy were one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comedy double acts of the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema...

     short film Thicker than Water. For each of the scene changes in this film, either Laurel or Hardy or both of them would seize a curtain or some other object at the edge of the frame and move it across the screen. The opening frames of the next scene were optically printed onto this object, so that—when the object entirely filled the screen—the movie had "wiped" the last shot of the previous scene and begun the first shot of the next.
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