Skills Audit: Filming and Editing Preliminary Match Cut Exercise

Before we tackle the task of creating a title sequence for a thriller, we were given the preliminary task of filming a character walking through a door, sitting opposite another character and exchanging a few lines of dialogue. The required elements of this task were: 1 match cut; shot/reverse shot; showing an understanding of the 180 degree rule.

In the brief of this task, no genre was specified. As a group, we decided to make our match cut exercise thrilling to give us more experience when it comes to filming our real title sequence. To make the scene thrilling, we decided to incorporate a bag swap (as seen in Collateral) and not include excessive amounts of dialogue - the lack of dialogue leaves the audience guessing what they are talking about and what is in the bag.

In our scene, we see a character walking down a corridor towards a door. We then see him tap in a code in to the lock on this door in extreme close-up. This character enters the room, and then faces a character that was already in the room, sitting at a table. The pair exchange a few lines of dialogue, then exchange a briefcase from under the table. After the briefcase has been given, the character gets up and leaves the room. We then see him walking back down the corridor.

Overall, the exercise was fairly successful in making us familiar with our groups and the equipment we will be using when we shoot our actual title sequence. We could have improved our editing pace to make it more thrilling, but all in all the editing was fairly good. We also suffered from a technical fault - the sound was not working on our camera. However, we will learn from this experience and make sure we check that the sound works on the camera before we start filming.