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Cut to Match

Match cuts are having a moment: Wikipedia's article on the match cut went from about 240 daily views on Sep 20 to 81,943 on Oct 2, 2026, and still drew 16,091 on Oct 20 (Wikimedia pageviews).

Two moments, one movement. Plan the cut before you film it.

List your shots: what is in frame, its shape, where it sits, which way it moves. The page draws the storyboard and reads every cut for free - what carries across, which seam fits, and whether it holds. One run writes the filming recipe for every cut.

Try one:

1 The video

2 The shots, in order

For each shot: what is in frame, its shape and colour, where it sits on a 3 by 3 grid, and how it starts and ends. A cut joins one shot's end to the next shot's start.

    Load a storyboard saved as .json - or drop it here

    3 The storyboard

    • How the shot starts
    • How it ends
    • Locked
    • Loose
    • Broken

    4 Onion skin

    Pick a cut on the storyboard.

    The page's findings

      5 Get the filming recipes

      The verdict follows a fixed rule: rethink if any cut is broken; tighten if the page found any gap; ready to shoot otherwise. The recipes use only the shots you list - no props, places or people you did not mention.

      Pricing as soon as the session is ready...

      6 Take it to the shoot

      The storyboard and the files work without a run; recipes, when there are some, are added to the Markdown and JSON.

      7 Kept storyboards

      How the page reads a cut

      A cut joins the end of one shot to the start of the next. Four things can carry across it: motion (the same move on both sides - left, right, up, down, push in, pull back or blur), shape (the same shape), place in frame (the same square of the 3 by 3 grid) and colour. Two or more is locked, one is loose, none is broken - and so is a cut where the motion doubles back (left into right) or the zoom flips (a push in answered by a pull back).

      The seams follow the cut-the-curve catalogue: cut motion at peak speed with the same direction and speed on both sides (cut the curve), push in on both sides (zoom-through), pull back on both sides and save it for the last cut (inverse zoom-through), blur out and back in at the blurriest frame, no more than about once every 8 seconds (rack-focus blur-cut), or hold the same shape in the same place (graphic match). Gaps: a loose cut, a slow side on a motion cut, travel that changes direction from one motion cut to the next, a pull-back before the last cut, too many rack-focus cuts. The seam timings are starting points to adjust by eye.