The Healthy Edit, 2nd Edition

6

Alternative Medicine

► Nontraditional Treatments

The Match Cut

When it comes to telling the story, whatever fulfills the needs of the scene is legitimate. This leads us to a crucial aspect of film doctoring: the need to break rules. Sometimes in watching a film you might notice what you would term a “bad cut.” But that bad cut might have saved the scene. It might have removed two pages of needless and boring exposition and, though it didn’t match perfectly, it was damn close.

Much has been written and discussed about the value of the match cut. As noted under the basic rules of editing, the process of continuity filmmaking allows editors to create match cuts by splicing the beginning of an action in one angle to the completion of that same ...