Today, I learnt about the match on action technique and was later assigned a filming activity involving the rule. Match on action is a filming technique involving filming an action being carried out from two different perspective on camera. However, the two shots need to look continuous and run smoothly from one another. For example someone may be denoted walking into a room and going in for a hug with a character and in a second shot the characters are shown hugging each other from a side angle.So, match on action helps create a sense of continuity and realistic movement.
Activity
My group was given the task of demonstrating Match on Action, by filming someone walking up a pair of stairs. Before filming my group took some time out to plan how we could incorporate match on action within the scenario. We sketched the idea of using two different cameras to film with, one at the bottom of the stairs and one at the top of the stairs to help us capture someone walking up the stairs continuously. When planning we needed to make sure that the camera's wouldn't be visible in each others shots. So, it was decided that one camera would be put at the top of the stairs and the other would be at the bottom of the stairs; allowing someone walking up the stairs to be captured from a low and high angle.
Within the filming task my role involved filming the main character walking up the stairs from a low angle. I had to make sure my camera was angled correctly and framed the character clearly walking up the stairs. Whilst filming I had to take into account the lighting of my settings when angling my camera.
Evaluation
The simplest part of the activity was filming. It wasn't too hard as it only involved making sure the main character was walking up the stairs at a realistic pace as well as making sure this action was clearly visible within the two cameras. The only small problem faced when filming was the camera's being visible in the shots from the two different angles. But, this was easy to overcome once the camera was placed at the correct angle. In addition, it was also quite simple to plan the scenario and divide the roles between the group making sure that the task was carried out equally.
On the other hand, the most challenging part of the day was editing the scene so it had a realistic and continuous outcome. It was difficult to edit the clips in order to make it appear that the main character was walking up the stairs in a fluid movement. This involved me being very precise when cutting parts of the film, making sure that the scene didn't have major jumps or over lap.
It was hard to make sure I was cutting the right section of the clip making sure that the number of stairs shown when looking at the clip from a low angle and a high angle were the same. This caused me to be very exact and critical using iMovie.
At first I kept on cutting the scene inaccurately, denoting different step numbers on screen when trying to merge the two angle's of the main character walking up the stairs. This mistake whilst editing caused the film as a whole to look jumpy. Hence, the action of the character walking up the stairs didn't look very realistic. To overcome this issue, I found it was useful to slow down the two clips within iMovie and watch them in slow motion. This allowed me to clearly pin point where I was making my mistakes when cutting and editing the sequence. Furthermore, I found that muting the sound when editing on iMovie made the the editing process much easier. At first I began to get very overwhelmed with making the action flow from the two shots, becoming very critical. I found that even after editing the clip well when slowing it down and being very accurate there was still something off about the clip. However, after watching it numerous times and finding flaws I decided to turn the sound off and watch the clip. Doing this allowed me to realise that the match on action was actually accurate. So, the sound from the clips clouded my judgment slightly.
This was a good point to learn from whilst editing, and muting the sound of a clip as well as slowing down a sequence may help me see things from a better perspective in future.
If I had a chance to do the task again I would try to change the positioning of the high angle camera. When watching the clip back from a critical perspective I noticed that from the high angle camera, the character walking up the stairs began to get cut out of the shot. The character's feet slightly got cropped out of the frame. To fix this issue I would have tried tilting the camera at various angles whilst it was on a tripod in hopes of finding a better angle framing the character walking up the stairs. Or, I could have tried increasing or decreasing the height of the tripod or even moving the tripod back to catch a better angle. Moving the camera to a better position would help create a better frame and hence cause the match on action to be much smoother on screen.
Overall from completing the task, I've learnt a very important filming skill. Match on action can be used in various scenario's where a character is moving, helping to create a realistic film and a smooth transition between shots. So, I can further apply this technique in my future filming tasks and my final project.
