Jump cut

A jump cut is a conspicuous discontinuity between two shots whose framings are nearly identical. Most of the time it comes from removing time inside one continuous take, but cutting between two similar setups with too little change in angle or shot size does it just as well. Because the framing barely changes, the subject appears to snap to a new position: a head jumps, a coffee cup empties itself, a hand teleports. Godard's 'Breathless' (1960) made it a deliberate style; YouTube made it the default grammar of anyone talking to a camera.

You use it for pace. Every 'um', breath, and dead pause comes out, and a rambling 8 minute take becomes a tight 4. It also works as an expressive beat: stacked jump cuts read as nervous energy, time collapsing, or comedic repetition.

Gotcha: outside that vlog context, an unintended jump cut reads as a mistake, and a wall of them gets exhausting fast. The standard fixes are to cover the edit with B-roll, alternate between two camera angles (shot and reverse), or punch in: scale the incoming clip 10 to 20 percent so the framing visibly changes and the brain accepts it as a new shot. Old film rule of thumb behind all of this: change the camera angle by at least 30 degrees or it will read as a jump.