Sometimes Cuts Just Don't Cut It!

   

 While filming our last scene in Macy's backyard, we hit a roadblock. We were unsure how to make our actions look authentic as we performed them. We are no perfectionists and knew our acting was not essential to the shots. However, we felt it would make the plot confusing if we could not execute this scene right. So, we worked at it for a very long time. The main dilemma was that we did not know how to make the two characters in the scene play catch with the prop (a beachball), without it looking choppy. We thought that the best solution would be to show an over-the-shoulder shot of the main character throwing the ball. Then, we would cut to the other character catching that same ball. However, we needed several cuts to make it look comprehensible. Still, it would just look like the ball came out of nowhere when we tried to play the two clips together! 

    For a while, we just settled on editing the clip later to make it look like a smoother transition. However, we came up with the idea of just letting it be one clip. As opposed to cutting it to make it look whole. The previous clip was a wide shot of all of us playing with some water rackets and balls around the pool. We still cut to the next scene after this one. However, instead of cutting from person to person, we decided it would be better to pan to the next person as the ball is in the air. As long as the phone was kept straight using the stand, it was not choppy at all! This also proved to be a solution to the problem of how we were going to transition to the next scene with the masked figure and the main character. Instead of using a cut to allow the masked figure to appear, we utilized a pan again. In the end, we panned to the masked figure once the main character caught the ball thrown in the previous shot and avoided choppiness yet again, successfully.