Planning the Preliminary Match Cut Exercise.

To be honest, we did not plan our Match Cut Prelim exercise that well. All we did was write out a list of the dialogue of what each character said.

Our storyline was basically in a setting at school- the teacher verses the 'mischievous, naughty' student who disobeys her and talks back rudely.
We had basic mise en scene setting such pens and notes in front of the teacher who would look formal and neat compared to the youngster student who wears a rucksack and has ruffled hair. We then talked about effective acting so that when watching the scene we can understand what role the characters should play as.

The shot reverse shot was pretty straight forward- we knew that whilst the character was saying the dialogue we will switch between each characters to show their face. We thought about the mixture of high angle shots and normal angle shots.

The match cut shot we wanted to do was a girl outside the door, then a close up of the handle and then the girl closing the door.

This was proven quite difficult- we had many re-trys to try make the sequence effective.
We had different mixture of long shots, medium shots and close ups- which portrays their expression. We tried to make this significant from our growing 'close ups' when their row increased between the teacher and the student; as well as the slight camera tilt to show which character is in power over the other.
In addition, we made sure we used the 1/3 rule and there should not be a big empty space when filming a character- also, we should make the empty space above the character's head almost equal in space when doing the shot reverse shot.
We used a mixture of hand-held shots when walking alongside the student character- as well as using the tripod for the still shots.

When filming, we took at least 2 shots of the same sequence (perhaps with a little change) so that when it comes to editing we can choose the best one for that shot.

We believed there was no use in using a storyboard for this Preliminary Match Cut Exercise, but an idea of what kind of shot we should use and the dialogue was extremely important.

However, for the 'Card Game' sequence (our very first filming task) we did plan out a story board, as it would be much easier for us to follow as we had very little knowledge and skills, so planning out a storyboard is convinient.