The REAL Name for NNISTs
Advice from Terry Rossio + Response to Comments
It turns out, I was kinda right in my Aladdin video—there is a term for “non-narrative inter-scenic tethers.”
An anonymous viewer wrote in:
I'm a WGA writer who did not go to film school, but I've done a lot of on-the-job training.
Probably for the best!
What you are calling NNISTs or "tethers" in your video already have a term of art in professional screenwriting. We call them "throws."
Terry Rossio (who coincidentally happened to write Aladdin) did a talk about Throws at the 2013 Austin Film Festival.
He or she also linked to a couple of article that summarized Mr. Rossio’s talk:
Rossio categorizes the types a little differently than David Bordwell did, and I think that’s a result of what the emailer said—real world practice rather than film scholarship.
As for me, I’m going combine the terminology of both. Broadly speaking, these transitions are throws, with the four sub-types of throws being picture-picture, picture-sound, sound-picture, sound-sound.
Another commenter took issue with me calling them “non-narrative,” pointing out that they frequently serve the narrative.
James has a point; I was inadvertently imprecise. What I meant is, they’re not necessarily narrative devices. As outlined in the video, the first four sequences or so are not narratively connected, and these throws cover up that fact.
But throws can just as easily be used to advance the narrative, as when a character asks, “Where are we going?” and then we cut to that location—a Sound-Picture Throw.
In case you missed it, here’s the original video—