What I Learnt From the Match Cut Practice- Thursday 8th Jan

Today with Annabel we were continuing with what we started with Rebecca. In the first half of the lesson we got our camera's and tripod's and began filming our very short film. The whole idea of this filming session was to practice our match cutting. We were given a very short synopsis of a character entering the room, sitting down and exchanging a few lines of dialogue with another character. The idea was simple so that we could focus on our match cutting.

I feel that this practice session didn't go as well as our previous one, with the newspaper thriller. We found it quite difficult trying to film everything to match together. At first we thought it would be quite easy but we thought wrong. Our camerawork was actually quite good and I feel that we definitely improved on that area. I think that one of the most successful shots was our over the shoulder shot. Salone balanced the camera on her shoulder and followed Georgina, it went really successful because the camera stayed steady throughout and looked really professional.

Our only down fall during the filming session was that we were quite slow so we didn't get to finish all of our filming, which ruined what we did have when we came to editing. Once again though when we were editing something went wrong with our computer. This time whilst we were doing our log and capture it froze and wouldn't allow us to view our video. We had to unplug our camera and quit final cut pro several times. However though, once we did get going the editing went smoothly. We all took it in turns to do something but two of us started of with the log and capture and then the other two of us took control of the match cutting. We all got to do part of each thing but we found it ran smoother with just two of us in control of the keypad and mouse and the other two putting in their input. That way everyone got a turn and there were no arguments. I feel that one of our match cut's didnt really work, and that was when 'character A' was seen walking through the door and the camera then cutting to another angle of her walking through the room. I dont think it looked very good because of the timing, it didnt fit well together.

Each time we do a practice filming session I always learn something different, and this time it was that when filming we need to be alot quicker. It took us an hour and a half to film 14 seconds of film and we need to produce a film of about 2minutes. I dont think it was so much that we were slow at filming and that we wasted time it was more that we kept filming the scenes again and again because we didn't think they looked right. I'm glad we got this one last practice because now I feel slightly more confident for our thriller.