And so on. Well, come morning, the director came in to look at my first cut, and I reeled up my Editing Tour de Force. Yeah, let's use that. That no matter how much sweat and time I'd put into placing those cuts, if they distracted from the content of the scene, they had no business being there. Now, don't get me wrong.
Transitions are great things.
They can magically move you from one scene to another so that the audience is unaware that you've delivered them to a totally different place. Or they can provide shock and excitement to introduce a new subject or idea. You could cover the whole trip in forty cuts. Or, you could do a nice dissolve from the airplane landing to a driving shot along the highway and then dissolve to them running out onto the beach. Simple, pretty and effective.