Planning Preliminary Match Cut Exercise Including Storyboarding

For this exercise we were given a synopsis of the opening to a film and then had to predict the shots that would be used.

The synopsis was:

"East London. 3pm. A man chain-smokes as he sits at his home PC. He copies confidential computer files and plans to a CD. He packages them and is seen posting them."

We were then given a sheet which had a grid with 20 rows. The instruction we were given was to fill the grid with our predictions of what shot types were used, where they were used and what happened in each shot. Following this we watched the clip and compared our predictions to what actually happened. About half of my predictions were right such as; a close up on the subjects mouth when he was inhaling the cigarette. These shots made us start to give some thought of the kind of shots we could use in our openings, what looks effective and keeps the audience interested.

We were next asked to create a storyboard to show what we had learnt in class. In this scene we were told to include to show how well we had understood the 180 degree rule, a match cut and a shot reverse shot.

The synopsis we were given for this scene was:

"a character opens a door, walks into a room, sits opposite another character and they share a few lines of dialogue"

For our scene we decided to shoot the subject's feet walking towards the camera, concealing their face to create suspension in the audience. The match cut would be of the door as it was opended by a hand on wone sidd of the door and opended on the subjects face in the next shot and our shot reverse show would be the two subjects conversation.