Match Cut Lesson

In today's lesson we learnt about match cuts. We were taught that a match cut is literally a cut from shot to shot in which the action matches with continuous movement. After the short introduction to match cuts, we were given a task to create a shot list for a sequence that contained no more than 20 shots of someone smoking a cigarette. I wasn't sure of how to do this at first, but after talking with my group it made more sense and became easier. Mickey then showed us a clip of how he filmed the sequence and this was helpful as we managed to identify some of the shots that we had written down, and we also were given ideas as to good match cuts to use. He effectively used many match cuts in his clip, showing the continuous motion of his character lighting and then smoking a cigarette, and his character sealing a letter. Another thing that our group noticed was how Mickey had set out his credits in his clip. He used a simple black screen with slow type - writer style writing to add tension to even the credits. Mary pointed out to us that Mickey had cleverly suggested time and location in his clip, which was something that none of us had realised. He had a shot of his character's watch and his use of the weather outside suggested his clip was set in the morning / early afternoon.

We were then given our preliminary match cut excercise. The brief was to film a short sequence of a character opening a door, walking into a room and having a conversation with another character. In our clip we must include match cuts, one example of shot / reverse shot and to show our understanding of the 180 degree rule. The 180 degree rule is the idea that if you film on the right hand side of a character, it would not make sense to then cut to a shot that is on the left hand side of the character as the motions the character were doing would look to the audience as opposite. For this excercise, we all had lots of ideas for what we should do. We decided to properly plan this time, as we felt as a group that last time around we had under planned and were thinking on the spot with regards to the shots we were going to do. After discussing with Mary, she allowed us to use the Media Storage Cupboard as our main setting. We felt this was good as the cupboard was a small enclosed space that creates an intimate tension between two characters. Also the lighting in the room was dim which creates tension and there were many interesting camera angles that we could choose to shoot from.




Through planning we came up with a lot of good ideas like setting it in the media storage cupboard and positioning the camera so that it sits in between the shelves so that it looks like the audience are watching something that is secret.