I hate an open brief. This was as open as it gets. Explore anything film related that your heart desires, and my heart desires too much. From the get go I hate a smattering of 4 or 5 seeds of ideas, and then about 3 new ones would develop after each exercise. As I rediscovered, I am a very time poor person and unfortunately only managed to produce three exercises related to my chosen areas this term but I still felt they were valuable to the video production business I run when I’m not at uni or work.

Of the 4 or 5 ideas I had at the beginning of the experimental side of the semester I had two that were the strongest and one that was a half idea that helped to give me a good idea of content to film. Match cutting and shot lengths with the half idea being my love of house numbers and the various shapes and forms they come in.

As a bit of background to the match cutting desire, it should be noted that I produce a lot of video content in my time outside of class both paid and unpaid. What I find myself doing the majority of the time is live events (such as keynote presentations or gigs) and sit down talking head interviews, particularly the latter. Once I (like most film lovers who started at a young age) learnt that star cutouts, newspaper flashes and screen wipes are edit transitions used by nobody in the film industry (except maybe Ang Lee and George Lucas. Wankers) for a good reason, I realised that really the only two acceptable edit types are: “The hard cut” and “The cross dissolve” (and MAYBE the dissolve through black). So I decided it was time to start being a big boy and follow the rules, no more crazy transitions. But after a few years of editing literally hundreds of hours of interviews, hard cutting has, I feel, turned me a bit conventional. And I know, conventional is good, people like conventional. People who know nothing about video production like conventional, they just don’t know it, but the moment you take it away something feels wrong (unless you’re French and are into that stuff). So I wanted to figure out a way of creating content that still uses hard cuts, but hides them in a easy to digest way.

Don’t think Birdman, think 2001. When primitive man discovers tools in the film, possibly the best known instance of a match cut occurs.

Birdman uses hidden cuts to explore theatre on screen, when a match cut occurs the audience certainly knows that something has changed in the time-space continuum, but it washes over us quickly, it almost tricks us. I would define a match cut as being different to a continuity edit in that if you do it well, you can change location and time drastically without confusing the audience too much, which is what the Stanley Kubrick example above does so damn well.

So as a result I made this in a couple of afternoons. Me making a cup of tea (plus a bonus at the end).

What did I learn? I learnt that if you want to make a match cut, you need to aim to do it from the outset and shoot with it in mind. The only way I’ve seen it done in a way that wasn’t an absolutely controlled environment was a filmmaker who filmed gigabytes of footage from a holiday in Turkey and produced an amazing abstract piece where all his shots seemed to seamlessly blend into each other in a really satisfying way. Link if you’d like to check it out: https://vimeo.com/108018156. Made me slightly depressed though because he shot on the same camera I have and made it look a hundred times better.

The shot lengths idea also grew out of a desire to understand what makes people go “that was a really nice video to watch. I don’t know why. It just was”. Often the feedback of the ignorant can be the most refreshing. So I figured that perhaps what people enjoyed subconsciously was a sense of variety, too much of the same thing becomes painfully dull. Then I remembered a comment my year 12 media teacher made (who coincidentally was an RMIT Media masters graduate). He said that as part of his masters he had to watch an old Japanese film where every single shot was the same length (roughly four seconds I think) and he said it lulled almost everyone in the room to sleep. Now whilst a video that relaxes people might be good, a client fast asleep isn’t exactly encouraging, so I figured “alright, why don’t I just make a quick film where no two shots are the same length?”.

So what you see below are 25 shots of archival footage that follow a length pattern. The first shot of the shark is 25 frames long, the next shot of the North Korean tanks is 24 frames long and so on and so forth all the way down to a single frame (which I guess at that stage is just a photograph. See if you can pause the video and identify what that frame is.