Cutting on Action

What is cutting on action? How does it seamlessly blend two shots together? What are two things that you must keep in mind when cutting on action in your films?

    Cutting on action is an editing technique that makes cuts and transitions seamless and smoother, sometimes almost invisible, to the audience. It's able to seamlessly blends two shots because our eyes are drawn to movement, so when there's a continuous motion through a cut, we focus on that instead of the change. Two things that you must keep in mind when cutting on action is the speed and matching the action. The speed that the motion is needs to be consistent to properly give the sense that it's the same thing that we're looking at. The example used by the article was a door being opened. You have to maintain the same speed from the door opening initially to the door opening from another angle or else it won't look like it's the same door. As for matching the action, it will look a lot worse and more clunky if the actions don't match up. The article's example was with a head turn. You have to match the action or else it will stutter and look like the character's head turns twice.