Preliminary Match Cut Exercise.

Before we were able to film our main thriller, we had to undergo a preliminary exercise. The point of this activity is to have a first hand glance and experience on actual filming, acting and editing. This will give us a head start to the stages that we will undergo in our final thriller sequence.

Before we start filming, we had to construct a storyboard which pinpoints roughly what we want particular shots to look like (in terms of camera angles and mise en scene), and what the story line is roughly. As a group, we decided the key shots that we wanted to use for our preliminary in order to carry out our match cut exercise properly.

Using our storyboard as a guide, we began filming. We had some difficulties using the tripod at first, because we weren't familiar with the different locks and knobs that were put in place. Similarly, with the camera, we didn't know how to function it properly because we weren't able to play around with the different options available to us before. However, after a while, we were able to mount the camera onto the tripod properly, as well as get to grips with the zooms and auto focusing of the camera.
Whilst filming our preliminary, we were able to explore different shooting angles and heights that we didn't originally plan in our storyboard. This made it more creative as, we came to figure out that different angles can depict different meanings in a shot. Eg. Low angle tilt looking up can show power and superiority. Another difficulty that we came across, was panning using the tripod. The neck of the tripod was too stiff which didn't allow us to move around flexibly. With little knowledge of how to undo the knob (yes, we seriously didn't know), we had no choice but to take the camera off and hand-hold it to pan. This made the finishing sequence seem amateurish and unprofessional, however, we have learnt from this mistake and know better, when filming the our final thriller sequence, to use the locks and knobs on the tripod.

After gathering all the shots that we needed, we headed to the editing suite and began putting our sequence together, on Final Cut Pro. We also stumbled through many difficulties whilst editing because we weren't familiar with ALL the functions. Eg. how to import rushes onto the program. However, we were still able to achieve the goal of this preliminary exercise; To make a successful match cut.

Click here to watch our preliminary.

Click here to see a quick animatic of our storyboard.