8th January - Match Cuts

I was not in this lesson due to me having a psychology examination. My absenteeism meant I had to attend a workshop for my teacher to explain what happened during this lesson. She explained that the basis of the lesson was match cuts. Match cuts are when an character being filmed is carrying out an activity and the audience are shown the character doing the activity at different angles or camera shots showing how powerful the camera use can be important in allowing the audience to understand what is going on and a sense of what the character is like. It is also a great technique to use in creating suspense as it allows the audience to see what the character is doing at every angle. This was a little bit confusing while she was explaining it to me but when she showed me a clip showing many match cuts in became very clear to me and made me understand why many thrillers use this camera technique to portray a particular thing. The clip had a simple plot but the use of camera shots and music made it much more thrilling than it really was. This gave me some ideas of how my group could construct our thriller using this technique. The following lesson, my group member Ola was in on his own in the lesson I was absent in because it was not only me who had the psychology examination, it was also the other two girls in my group (Sevin and Selma). Ola kept us updated on what he had done that lesson. He had filled in a sheet about what our group would be doing in our filming sessions in terms of Camera shots and use of angles, what is going to happen in each scene, if there would be any use of dialogue, the overall plot and where all the match cuts would be shown in the film. This meant that he had made all the decisions about the elements we would be using so we had trusted his work and we then waited to see the outcome. This did cause a little confusion in our group as we didn’t know entirely what was supposed to happen and it was very difficult for any of us to interfere and change particular parts because we were not very sure of the match cut procedures and what he was trying to illustrate in this piece of practical work. This showed us that we needed more discussion within the group before we start any filming practical. This is explained more in the next blog.