Long take

In filmmaking, a long take (also called continuous take or continuous shot) is a shot lasting much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general. Significant camera movement and elaborate blocking are often elements in long takes, but not necessarily so. The term "long take" should not be confused with the term "long shot", which refers to the distance between the camera and its subject and not to the temporal length of the shot itself. The length of a long take was originally limited to how much film the magazine of a motion picture camera could hold, but the advent of digital video has considerably lengthened the maximum potential length of a take.

Early examples

When filming Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock intended for the film to have the effect of one long continuous take, but the camera magazines available could hold not more than 1000 feet of 35 mm film. As a result, each take used up to a whole roll of film and lasts up to 10 minutes. Many takes end with a dolly shot to a featureless surface (such as the back of a character's jacket), with the following take beginning at the same point by zooming out. The entire film consists of only 11 shots.[1][lower-alpha 1]

Andy Warhol and collaborating avant-garde filmmaker, Jonas Mekas, shot the 485-minute-long experimental film, Empire (1964), on 10 rolls of film using an Auricon camera via 16 mm film which allowed longer takes than its 35 mm counterpart. "The camera took a 1,200ft roll of film that would shoot for roughly 33 minutes."[3]

Later examples

A handful of theatrically released feature films, such as Timecode (2000), Russian Ark (2002), PVC-1 (2007), and Victoria (2015) are filmed in one single take, others are composed entirely from a series of long takes, while many more may be well known for one or two specific long takes within otherwise more conventionally edited films. In 2012, the art collective The Hut Project produced The Look of Performance, a digital film shot in a single 360° take lasting 3 hours, 33 minutes and 8 seconds. The film was shot at 50 frames per second, meaning the final exhibited work lasts 7 hours, 6 minutes and 17 seconds.[4]

The police procedural series The Bill used long takes to achieve a documentary style effect.[5] Other examples include The X-Files episode "Triangle" (season 6, episode 3), directed (and written) by the series creator Chris Carter. The technique is also frequently used in ER, which fits with the show's use of Steadicam for the majority of shots. An episode "The Inheritance / CID 111" of the Indian suspense drama CID, broadcast on 7 November 2004, is a 111-minute-long single take. It currently holds the Guinness World Record for the longest single shot for TV.

Another example from television can be seen in the first season of HBO's True Detective. In episode four, "Who Goes There", protagonist Detective Rustin Cohle (portrayed by Matthew McConaughey) is undercover as part of a biker gang who have decided to brazenly rob a drug den located in a dangerous neighborhood. The shot begins with the bikers arriving to the drug den with McConaughey's character reluctantly in tow. The six-minute shot moves in and out of various residences, through several blocks and over a fence while shots are fired by shouting gangsters, bikers and police as they arrive on the scene. McConaughey at first assists the biker gang, then turns on them to abduct the leader, dragging him along for more than half of the continuous shot.[6] Director Cary Joji Fukunaga commented to The Guardian, "We required the involvement of every single department, like a live theatre show. We had make-up artists hiding in houses so they could dash out and put make-up on [Cohle's hostage] Ginger's head. We panned away for a second to do that. We also had ADs peppered around the neighborhood with extras who had specific things to yell and specific places to run. We had stunt guys coordinating with stunt drivers to pull up at the right time, special-effects guys outside throwing foam bricks and firing live rounds."[7]

Another example of a long take with a steadicam is from Battlestar Galactica (miniseries) (2003), the first episode, second scene, from 5:32-8:55. There is a 3 minute 23 second continuous steadicam shot covering several of the main cast through several rooms.

The John Wick series of films are known for their long take fight scenes. This was due to the budgetary constraints of using only a single high-end camera for all the filming, and required close choreography with the various extras involved in the fights, having to run behind the camera after being one of the first fallen attackers as to come in again as a new attacker.[8]

In 2010, artist engineer Jeff Lieberman co-directed a 4-minute music video with Eric Gunther, featuring the indie band OK Go performing their song "End Love". The video was shot in a continuous take using three cameras, running 18 hours from before sunset to 11am the following day. The footage was condensed using time lapse techniques ranging up to 170,000 times speedup, with some brief slow-motion segments also recorded at 1500 frames per second.[9]

The 2017 Japanese zombie comedy film One Cut of the Dead opens with a 37-minute shot. The film is set in an old water filtration plant, where a crew shooting a zombie horror film is attacked by real zombies. The film is notable for having been shot with a budget of $25,000 and having grossed over 1000 times its cost.

Sequence shot

A sequence shot is a shot, a long take, that includes a full narrative sequence containing multiple scenes in its duration, meaning different locations or different time periods. The term is usually used to refer to shots that constitute an entire scene. Such a shot may involve sophisticated camera movement. It is sometimes called by the French term plan-séquence. The use of the sequence shot allows for realistic or dramatically significant background and middle ground activity. Actors range about the set transacting their business while the camera shifts focus from one plane of depth to another and back again. Significant off-frame action is often followed with a moving camera, characteristically through a series of pans within a single continuous shot. An example of this is the first scene in the jury room of 12 Angry Men, where the jurors are getting settled into the room.

Another notable example occurs near the beginning of Antonioni's The Passenger, when Jack Nicholson exchanges passport photos while the audience hears a tape recording of an earlier conversation with a now dead man, and then the camera pans (no cut) to that earlier scene.

Another example is the famous "Copacabana shot" featured in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), in which Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) takes his girlfriend to a nightclub passing through the kitchen.

Average shot length

Films can be quantitatively analyzed using the "ASL" (average shot length), a statistical measurement which divides the total length of the film by the number of shots. For example, Béla Tarr's film Werckmeister Harmonies is 149 minutes, and made up of 39 shots.[10] Thus its ASL is 229.2 seconds.

The ASL is a relatively recent measure, devised by film scholar Barry Salt in the 1970s as a method of statistically analyzing the editing patterns both of individual films and of groups of films (for example, of the films made by a particular director or made in a particular period). Film scholars who have made use of ASL in their work include David Bordwell and Yuri Tsivian. Tsivian used the ASL as a tool for his analysis of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (ASL 5.9 seconds) in a 2005 article.[11] Tsivian also helped launch a website called Cinemetrics, where visitors can measure, record, and read ASL statistics.

Directors known for long takes

Continuous shot full feature films

A "one-shot feature film" (also called "continuous shot feature film") is a full-length movie filmed in one long take by a single camera, or manufactured to give the impression that it was. Given the extreme difficulty of the exercise and the technical requirements for a long lasting continuous shot, such full feature films have only been possible since the advent of digital movie cameras.

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See also

References
Footnotes
  1. For a complete analysis of Hitchcock's hidden and conventional cuts in Rope, see David Bordwell's text in "Poetics of Cinema", 2008[2]
References
  1. Miller, D. A. "Anal Rope" in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, pp. 119–172. Routledge, 1991. ISBN 0-415-90237-1
  2. Bordwell, David. "From Shriek to Shot". Poetics of Cinema (Paperback; 2007 ed.). Routledge. p. 32+. ISBN 0415977797.
  3. Cripps, Charlotte (10 October 2006). "Preview: Warhol, The Film-Maker: 'Empire, 1964', Coskun Fine Art, London". The Independent. London.
  4. The Hut Project. "The Look of Performance". Archived from the original on 12 May 2012.
  5. "TV Tropes: The Oner".
  6. "Seitz: Why True Detective's 6-Minute Tracking Shot Is More Than Just 'Awesome'". Vulture. Retrieved 22 November 2018.
  7. Fukunaga, Cary (17 March 2014). "How we got the shot: Cary Fukunaga on True Detective's tracking shot". the Guardian. Retrieved 22 November 2018.
  8. Pappademos, Alex (15 April 2019). "The Legend of Keanu Reeves". GQ. Retrieved 15 April 2019.
  9. Rothermel, Ryan (22 June 2010). "OK Go "End Love" – Masters of the One Take Music Video, by Gunther and Lieberman". Motionographer. Retrieved 9 March 2020.
  10. "RogerEbert.com : Great Movies: Werckmeister Harmonies". Rogerebert.suntimes.com. 8 September 2007. Retrieved 29 January 2012.
  11. Yuri Tsivian, in The Griffith Project: Vol. 9: Films Produced in 1916–1918, Paolo Cherchi Usai (ed.), text at Cinemetrics.
  12. "Chantal Akerman". Filmref.com. Archived from the original on 3 February 2012. Retrieved 29 January 2012.
  13. Coyle, Jake (29 December 2007). "'Atonement' brings the long tracking shot back into focus". Boston Globe. Retrieved 29 December 2007.
  14. 10 Signs You're Watching a Wes Anderson Movie|EW.com
  15. The 12 Best Directors That Often Use Long Takes - Taste of Cinema
  16. Greg Gilman. ‘One Tree Hill’ Director Completes World’s First One-Shot Rom-Com (Exclusive). Netflix. The Wrap. Retrieved 24 December 2013
  17. The 20 Best Long Takes In Movies|IndieWire
  18. The 20 Best Long Takes In Movies|IndieWire
  19. A Woman Under the Influence (1974) - AllMovie
  20. 'The Eddy' Team on How Jazz 'Brings Together Different Groups' — Variety
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  27. 16 incredible long takes|BFI
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  30. Bong Joon-ho: Living Images, Moving Frames|Features|Roger Ebert
  31. 20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History - GeekWeek
  32. Billson, Anne (15 September 2011). "Take it or leave it: the long shot". The Guardian. London.
  33. Rafferty, Terrence (14 September 2008). "David Lean, Perfectionist of Madness". The New York Times.
  34. Sergio Leone, Father of spaghetti westerns Archived 26 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  35. Steve McQueen's long shot in 'Hunger' is paying off, Los Angeles Times, 22 March 2009.
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  41. Tag Archives: David Lean
  42. Fujiwara, Chris. "Senses of Cinema: Otto Preminger". Archive.sensesofcinema.com. Archived from the original on 3 March 2010. Retrieved 29 January 2012.
  43. Colliding with history in La Bete Humaine: Reading Renoir's Cinecriture
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  45. Marcus, Millicent (2002). "After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age". JHU Press. Retrieved 14 July 2020.
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  52. 16 incredible long takes|BFI
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Bibliography
  • A History of Narrative Film by David Cook (ISBN 0-393-97868-0)
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