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Long Takes In the Movies, Antidote To CGI?
brumgrunt submitted a Den of Geek story about long takes in movies. The premise is that CGI has made so many things possible that it all rings sterile now. Long shots are a better way to be flashy. Personally I absolutely love long takes, and I always elbow my wife excitedly when they happen. She probably hates them now! Some of the examples cited here are probably unfamiliar but maybe that'll just give you an excuse to queue them on Netflix.
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I can probably see why people would like this, but it seems like a long shot to me
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No love for Russian Ark?
When my .cgi takes too long I just use FastCGI;
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Old Boy had a great fight scene shot in one take.
Long takes will only hurt the film editing industry, we need to pass a law limiting the length of any given scene.
Why more people don't mention Rope when they're talking about their favorite Hitchcock movies, I don't understand. Great movie. And (on topic!) the whole movie is just something like 3(?) takes.
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Tony Jaa in The Protector. One of the best single shot scene's I've ever seen for sure.
only one everything
CGI was exciting when I first saw them adapt it for Babylon 5's spaceships (instead of models) and of course Jurassic Park's dinosaurs. It provided a new means to do things that had been impossible before.
But now it's old hat. Like the space shuttle launches I never watch. (yawn). Let's get back to focusing on the story so that, even if CGI did not exist at all, the movie or show would still be entertaining.
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And where's the love for the "Follow me" scene after the very famous and disgusting "Mr Creosote" scene in "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life", huh?
long takes require good actors that can actually remember more than two sentences in a row. ie: not Keira Knightley.
What?! No Hitchcock's 'Rope'!??!
And no...
[Please insert you list of overlooked films in a tone of outrage here.] ... ?!?!!?!???!
Just sayin'.
Long shots kinda feel like being in a first person shooter.
I wonder if the opposite, the almost stroboscopic shooting and editing of scenes in contemporary television and cinema, are the cause or the effect of the millisecond attention span of today's ADD-infested viewers?
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I scrolled through his list saying to myself "He better have Children of Men on there" which of course was the very bottom. Now I mean you can like that movie for a lot of reasons but one of the things that I Really like about it is the fact that they do the Long Takes and execute them well.
It creates a greater sense of immersion - when the camera cuts from scene to scene too often - I don't feel like I'm in one place and subconsciously get jarred and reminded that I'm watching people acting out a scene. With a long shot that follows the actors around or pans to each character instead of cutting to each character - I feel like I'm actually standing there, as a passive observer, watching these things unfold.
Now - when I see a long take in a movie, I feel like I can enjoy the movie more itself in that I feel more immersed in the story, but reflecting upon it I also admire the difficulty directors and Actors have with such scenes. Especially when you've got a bunch of explosive rigs and dollys and whatnots all lined up - and getting extras to do what they're told... These kinds of shots aren't the kind that you can just say "Cut! Try it again from the top!" - you have to get it just about right the first time to film.
As a side note, the opening scene to Children of Men, after watching some of the bonus content on the DvD it looks like Clive Owen's character was meant to grab his coffee and then turn and run for cover, but in the actual film he is so jarred that he spills it - I have always wondered if that was a last second change or decision - or if that was just a nice side effect of only getting 1 take on film.
Let's go for the really long takes.
In Kenneth Branaugh's Henry V there is one of the most amazing tracking shots ever filmed. It happens after the battle and starts when Henry picks up the dead boy. The next 5+ minutes are of him carrying the boy through the blood and gore of Agincourt to the soaring sounds of the Kyrie Eleison. It gives me chills just to think of it.
You do the scenes in shorter takes and ensure everyone is standing at their marks at the beggining and ending of every scene, you can touch up the transition frames with CGI.
The effects and long takes won't save a movie from being bad. Only a good story line, plot and acting will save a movie from being bad.
Just think how awesome Episode1 TPM could have been if the story and acting were excellent.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
One thing CGI and modern technology has allowed for are the impossible camera moves. Yes, it's impressive to zoom in on a flying aircraft and right through the glass into the interior. It's impressive to follow a bomb dropping from the plane until it goes down the stack of a battleship or fly down Orthanc into the flaming pits below it. But these impossible shots draw attention to their artificiality by being so impossible. I'll give Lord of the Rings a pass on some of the more extreme camera stuff because the CGI was so impressively integrated but I did wonder how the whole thing would have looked if it was filmed in a more deliberately like an old Hollywood sword and sandals epic, acting like a real camera was involved and just happening to sprinkle in all the CGI monsters.
Michael Bay/Borne Trilogy/Lucaswank modern cinema becomes an exercise in bad storytelling. It's impossible to follow the action, impossible to realize what you're even seeing, and the overwhelming amount of CGI bling ruins the impact of each individual shot. I really have to agree with the Red Letter Media critique of the Star Wars prequels. (the 90 minute long reviews with the serial killer). He points out how the Lucas team was impressed with how much crap they managed to shove into a scene but lost sight of trying to tell an actual story.
The early silent films played out a lot like cartoon shorts, trying to use pictures to tell a simple story. That sort of thing was picked up by the cartoons in the age of the talkies and through the decades we keep finding people who have relearned the old lesson. You look at the Pixar shorts or some of the stuff making it onto Youtube from animation students and you see people who might be using really high technology but they're making sure they tell a coherent story with characters you identify with and care about.
Your level of stylization within that framework can vary and I've seen some very good films with frantic camerawork but there's no way to use style to make up for a weak story and weak film-making. That seems to be Hollywood's biggest mistake right now.
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The final scene in "Big Night." It very quickly became legendary. Great movie.
Joss Whedon's Serenity features a nearly ten-minute long scene with no visible cuts (there is technically a seamless dissolve half-way through for technical reasons -- watch the DVD commentary and you'll see what I mean). Whedon didn't do it to show off or grab attention, but actually to make the audience feel safe and trusting after the rapid cuts and scene/flow changes found at the very beginning of the film.
I find rapid cuts annoying and a way to draw the viewer away from a lack of detail or a scene that can't carry itself on the acting/sets/dialog/action alone. I don't seek out long takes though -- like most things in movies: if they're done really well you shouldn't be thinking about them, but rather about the plot.
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...just to be impressed by technical tricks? Are you disappointed by Citizen Kane because the clever camera work doesn't jump out at you?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Opening sequence of Serenity? Technically it's two long sequences match-cut together at the stairwell, but still... Not long enough?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Any list without the long take that opens The Player is suspect.
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The example cited in the story of Avatar is a pretty obvious example. But even in less obvious examples like Children of Men, which had very long and well-done long-takes, at least some of the long takes are done through compositing and CGI. The two, CGI, are not mutually exclusive.
Frankly, I'm afraid that overuse of long takes would just result in another annoying cinematic cliche.
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The last take of the Antonioni's The Passenger is pretty neat.
My favorite long take is the Genesis Effect scene in Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn. It's a long zoom toward the Genesis planet and a descent around it, flying between mountain peaks, while it morphs from a lifeless planet to something covered with fractal plant scenery. All in one very long CGI take. This was made at Pixar really long ago when CGI was much more difficult because computers were so much slower. The computer involved was a VAX 780 (I still have the front panel from that VAX in my office) and it ran with the diagnostic command "SET CLOCK FAST" for over a month to do that scene. At one point they realized that they were flying THROUGH a mountain, and they backed up a few frames and had a notch grow in the mountain range as they approached it. It's clearly visible in slow motion - they just didn't have enough time to redo many frames of the scene and it goes by too fast to notice in real time if you don't know about it. Alvy Ray Smith said that he hadn't met George Lucas (who is famously reclusive) and that after seeing the rush of that scene, George knocked on Alvy's office door and said "Good Take!". And that's all the interaction with George that Alvy said he had. But aside from this old and not very realistic looking scene, a lot of modern long takes are CGI, and you can't tell!
Bruce Perens.
... that they really are single long takes?
Back in the old days, long takes were faked by splicing shorter ones together where the camera 'accidentally' flared when passing the sun or another bright light source. Or when a close in pedestrian (out of focus) briefly passed in front of the camera. There are a few instances where the cut was made between live scenes and models or CGI. I recall the director's track on 'Moon' describing just such a transition. And that was a low budget production, so the effect is easily done.
With good morphing s/w and motion controlled cameras, it should be easy to stitch together lots of little clips more or less seamlessly.
Have gnu, will travel.
Making good CGI is comparatively easy: you hire talented professionals and let them do the work. With proper art direction and CGI staff, you can literally say "make me some cool CGI" and they will, because people have been doing it for...20ish (I think, or more) years.
To some extent, casting is comparatively easy, because most Hollywood actors are one-trick ponies.
On the other hand, writing a good movie is apparently very difficult. I say that because probably 4 out of 5 movies have lame plots, bad pacing, awful dialog, etc.
Consider the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The first one had a crisp screenplay and for a movie that is 2:23 hours, it really crackles all the way through. Good, memorable lines that we can all quote, lots of dramatic tension, fun comedy, etc. - a very well-written movie. The 2nd and 3rd? Pure junk - awful writing, lame storylines that made no sense, etc. The casting, CGI, etc. are all a constant - it's the writing.
Or the Iron Man movies. The first one was again pure gold: great writing (admittedly, they had help as it was based on the Marvel comic, but still, they had to write a screenplay), good dialogue, a very fun movie. The second one? Nearly a bomb - nonsensical plot, actors that looked bored, everyone walked out saying 'why did they bother?' The difference again is writing.
Good writing + weak CGI can still mean a great film. Weak writing + utterly fantastic CGI always means a terrible film (as the three most recent Star Wars movies attest).
It's the writing, not the CGI.
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Just fill in the blanks, and you'll realize that it's a silly question. The article could have just said, "people are abusing CGI, please stop". Of course, that wouldn't have been as interesting.
If people start shooting long takes just for the sake of it, It'll probably become just as annoying as CGI.
Closures the antidote to temporary objects? Yeah, sure.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
But I think its the only one in that movie - as far as I can recall.
He's talking about movies that actually use it as a feature as much as other movies use CGI.
Overdo the long shot and it too will seem like a cheap way to be flashy.
It is not visual style alone that makes a movie, much like is repeated in the posts for every nostalgic video game article.
Movies with long shots or with CGI can be equally unwatchable and boring.
Has anyone seen Roy Anderson's "Songs From The Second Floor"? It's a really great Swedish film about the end of the world that consists pretty much entirely of long, mesmerizingly awesome shots. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120263/
It's almost pointless. yes, one shot of an enter scene. cool, but so what? I don't care about the editing, I just want a good movie.
Someone could create a piece of animation thats many minute of no editing.
If you watch a long shot, and are think about the long shot, then the director has failed.
The article is just a rant against technology. It nearly reads like a Luddite manifesto. Technology is going to eventual remove stunts, back grounds, voice acting, and maybe even script writing.
I just listen to a documentary where they talk about a guy who created a computer program that can look at all the works of a composer , find a pattern, and then create a NEW work based on that. And it's really good, AND it sounds like something that composer would of created. It does it in 5 minutes. I don't see why that can't eventually happen to ANY piece of art.
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"The Assissination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" has some of the longest shots imaginable. One of the reasons I loved this movie was because of the daring it took to make a movie with such slow pacing about murderers. Each frame is printable and suitable for framing.
"Birth" seems to barely have a script. Slow paced and focused on the acting to such a degree that entire scenes take place in body language and facial expression. It's a treat to see a modern film that takes time to develop a character and let you savour their craft.
I love The Shining, as well as Full Metal Jacket, for this exact reason. Some of the long takes in those movies are beyond impressive. Kubrick had a great vision, and demanded a lot from his actors, but when everything comes together the long takes make you sit up and pay attention.
The long (30 second?) shot of Danny on his big-wheel riding through the empty Overlook in The Shining is one of my favorite scenes in any movie ... the sound of the wheels moving from each surface to the next is perfect, and it is the perfect expression of an empty space. That would have been ruined if there had been cut shots to various angles. Same with the chase through the maze - one long shot of Jack slogging through trying to catch Danny. amazingly, thought the shot is ahead of the character, it's not obvious that a camera and sound crew are running ahead of him.
I love long shots, especially ones that start off standard (say, a person walking down the street) but then after a bit of following them, the shot backs off and up into the air - makes you sit up and go 'how the hell??'
The author is right - CGI doesn't impress anymore, it's just assumed. Long shots show skill and dedication to the craft.
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...to the opening tracking shot of Paths of Glory. So much going on.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
Put some some poor sucker with a stedicam on a crane or dolly and just have them walk off. He uses it to open Boogie Nights, throughout Magnolia and in most of his films.
I suspect a lot of these type shots are directly attributable to the stedicam. Most notable first use was getting Rocky up those museum steps. Not sure how much they would have had to build to get a crane or dolly shot to do the same thing.
As far as antidotes to CGI are concerned, I vote "no." Long takes are just another tool. They don't make a bad film good. And they aren't an antidote.
X-Files did a long take in one of their episodes that took place on a ship at sea. I don't remember the name of the episode, but it was a very very long take. I remember 10 minutes, but I'm almost positive I'm incorrect on that time frame.
Long takes are great to see. There is more thought behind setting them up, such as setting clue and key points in the shot that are referenced later in a film.
If you're a fan of dark humor and enjoy scenes that get dragged out to the point of discomfort, then please let me suggest you watch "Bronson." It's available on Netflix as well.
That's not a reaction to CGI, it's a reaction to MTV. Music videos pioneered the quick-cut style of filmmaking. MTV had a big chunk of content at about one cut per second, which was an innovation at the time. That moved into TV production, partly as a way to pick up the pace, and partly as a way to get show length down and commercial time up. Then films started following that trend. By the last James Bond film, "Quantum of Solace", the cut rate had reached the point that action scenes were a bunch of blurry clips. There's a database of average shot length in films; "Quantum of Solace" comes in at an average shot length of 1.5 seconds. This is close to the record for big-budget films.
Long tracking shots are usually a gimmick. "The Player" has an 8-minute long take, but it's a visual joke, and even references long takes. Very few directors use long takes well. "The West Wing" was famous for long tracking shots which advanced the plot effectively. That's rare.
To the extent that CGI has anything to do with this, it's the fact that action-heavy movies are assembled like cartoons. Traditionally, film directors came from the theater. Production started with a script and a group of actors, sitting around a table and doing a reading. Cartoons, on the other hand, started with a storyboard, a real board filled with rows of cards with sketches. Dialogue was made to fit the action.
Effects-heavy movies require major preplanning. (A Star Wars movie is "three years of pre-production, six months of principal photography, three years of post-production", says one of the participants.) Bringing all the pieces together is a huge logistic job, and improvisation runs the costs through the roof. So directors who get it right on the storyboard, check it out with pre-visualization, and build the movie as designed are favored in Hollywood. I know one successful live-action director who came from stop-motion animation, the most pre-planned of all forms.
This style of production favors short shots, which are assembled in post-production. Action scenes are assembled one bit at a time, pacing can be adjusted in post, and dialogue is re-added using automated dialogue replacement. But that only drives shot lengths down to the 3-5 second range. Below that, it's forced pacing.
Anyone else noticed this? From the article:
Indeed, each film has such a spoiler rating — at the end of the description. To add insult to injury, the first scene has a rating of 3, so at the time you notice that to be warned you have to look at the end first, the damage has already been done.
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Hands down my favorite long-take... at the House of Blue Leaves. Just brilliant.
See, for example, David Mamet's 'On Directing' if you don't understand why.
In fact, one of the biggest problems with CGI is that it's often used in long shots which couldn't possibly be filmed without it, and therefore it's insanely, blatantly, in-your-face screaming 'this was created in a computer, none of this ever happened, tremble in awe at my l33t CGI budget!'
John Dall from "Rope" was in another movie with a famous long take, "Gun Crazy" from 1950. From the wikipedia article on "Gun Crazy":
The bank heist sequence was shot entirely in one long take in Montrose, California, with no one besides the principal actors and people inside the bank alerted to the operation. This one-take shot included the sequence of driving into town to the bank, distracting and then knocking out a patrolman, and making the get-away. This was done by simulating the interior of a sedan with a stretch Cadillac with room enough to mount the camera and a jockey's saddle for the cameraman on a greased two-by-twelve board in the back. Lewis kept it fresh by having the actors improvise their dialogue.
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One must mention Russian Ark (2002), which is an entire movie done in one 96-minute take.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark
A.
(who didn't particularly like the movie)
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Most Bruce Lee films do this. The fights are just videos of him acting out a fight. Most other martial arts films/shows love to flip from viewpoint to viewpoint for every technique, so you can't tell what's going on. As a martial artist you can actually learn some nice techniques from watching Lee that you can't from other films. Frenetic short takes just hide the action.
Not a sentence!
I really enjoy long shorts and really get turned off by rapidly changing takes. Bourne Ultimatum, Revenge of the Sith and Spider-Man 3 come to mind as terrible offenders. The original Clerks movie has a nice long seven minute take. And one of my favourite takes is from Return of the Pink Panther where Peter Sellers does some amazing little stunts while searching a hotel room.
mentioning Hitchcock's The Rope (2 long takes, stitched up as only one) nor Altman's The Player's 7-min opening shot.
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is definitely missing from the list. Anyone else remember the last scene in the movie? The camera is behind the bar, a guy goes up a bowls a strike. Dude sits at the bar, talks with Sam Elliot. Sam finishes up the movie, saunters off stage. The same guy in the background goes up and bowls a perfect strike... one of the best long shots I've seen.
I made it five minutes through this movie before the crazy CGI action started making my head hurt and I turned it off.
WAY too much.
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Out of the billions of people on Earth, only a tiny fraction make movies. Of that tiny fraction, only a tiny fraction make movies. Of that tiny fraction, only a tiny fraction make movies that are seen by a lot of people. Great creativity among that tiny fraction out of a tiny fraction is rare. On top of that, many moviemakers are constrained by pre-existing idioms (largely because of audience expectation--what sells). Lastly, movies are still a very new medium. Only in the last few years has the technology reached the masses.
CGI is being used now in a manner that will be considered crude in the near future. Single-shot scenes will be much easier to create/simulate with the aid of CGI. That can only give filmmakers more pacing alternatives. We're just not seeing the fruit of all those CGI-generated possibilities yet because the creatiive filmmakers haven't discovered them yet.
Jump cutting is SO overused, but it's overused because (for so many people) it works. You see it all the time on TV, where it is used to jazz up cheap to produce "reality" shows. This overuse feeds the idiomatic excessive use of jump cuts because audiences expect them.
I'm hopeful because of the influx of new talent promoted by new means of production and distribution.
How about instead of coming up with some new bullshit gimmick to carry your movie, you just make a good movie, and then use whatever cinematic techniques will best enhance a given part of the movie.
Although I will say there are 2 camera techniques I can't stand. Shaky cam and low FPS in action movies. To me, neither of these "enhance" the action, or make it more "frantic". I have 20/20 vision and visual acuity honed by years of playing video games and all they do is make it so I can't tell what the fuck is going on. The worst examples I can come up with are certain parts of Gladiator and the first Transformers movie. Transformers was especially bad because the things already look like random shards of colored metal. Batman Begins had a couple bad parts, too, I think.
Raging Bull had a great long shot that also changes from a hand-held camera to a crane shot. It starts in Jake Lamotta's dressing room, and follows /leads him out into and down a hall, into the boxing arena, then becomes a crane shot, still following his trek to the ring....
After the opening scene in the Discovery, Frank can be seen eating while Dave enters from the inner core and walks over to get his own dinner. 15 seconds max.
Not a long shot? Watch it carefully.
Remember that the Discovery interior is a large cylinder that rotates to allow the walker to remain at the bottom of the ring. That means that while Dave is walking over to Frank, Frank is hanging from the ceiling.
There's a bit of a fake because they switch shots when Dave passes under the center. After that you can see that he has to stand on an angle when he goes to the food machine.
No reason to do this shot that way, but he did.
TFA ends "I'll return to the subject of long takes in the next week or two, where I'll take a look at ... the longest single take in cinema history", which I assume is Russian Ark.
Indeed, that movie is a tour-de-force of single takes. 2000+ actors, 90+ minutes, one take. (They actually shot the whole thing three times.) The movie is far more interesting with the commentary track describing how it was done; the straight soundtrack renders it nigh unto unwatchable. A technical, not artistic, triumph.
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Here is the link.
I'm really surprised this didn't make the list. Not only is it a brilliant and amazing shot, it is a total tearjerker in one of the best movies I've ever seen.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I thought they were doing that long shot to show off the set they built of the inside of the Serenity for the movie -- it was supposed to be the first time the entire thing had been created all together, right?
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A most memorable Mad About You episode was a straight single ~25 minute take. Despite ultra-low budget (hallway shot, camera didn't even move), it was very emotionally engaging - still chokes me up to think about it.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Russian Ark was a whole movie shot in a single shot.
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While we're on the subject of Whedon (and I realize this is not the same as a movie sequence, but...) Just the other day I noticed that Neil Patrick Harris' first scene in Dr. Horrible is actually a really long take. And his delivery of every bit of it is fantastic.
The opening sequence to Serenity. It's two long takes stitched together, but it is still impressive. Long tracking shot through the ship, timing of the actors, and some of the lines are in Chinese. Whole crew nails it. Impressive as hell.
I can only find the stupid video in French though. Most annoying.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Nice long shot of the young mobster and his girlfriend walking to the restaurant, skipping the long waiting line, manuvering through the kitchen, and to their just-placed table five feet from Henny Youngman.
... but not because of CGI or 3D. Long takes will become more commonplace as computerization improves to the point where directors can use virtual actors. This will make the long take much easier to film (i.e. no slipups).
David
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This ad by Subaru is one of the best I've seen in ages... Simply because the creative effort put into it is matched only by a few. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3X9hJpbDo
The long take is an old technique with countless excellent examples, but I really love Kubrick's use of them in The Shining. Particularly in two instances: Danny's traversal of the halls on his trike, and meandering through the garden maze towards the end of the film.
These scenes to me are especially captivating because of the motion of the camera through these corridors. It's one thing to have a fixed point camera for a long scene, but it's quite another to have a moving camera for such a long time; the potential missteps are countless. The maze scene in the Shining is notorious for how long it took to complete. The sense of motion and space that this sort of cinematography can provide is really quite spectacular though, and I think it often justifies the effort.
David Mamet is a great playwright, but he can't direct his way out of a paper bag.
As a union film editor currently working in Hollywood on independent features, I would like to weigh in on this issue.
There is no single answer to any of this. Computer generated effects are not bad. Quick cuts are not bad. Long takes are not bad. Handheld is not bad. None of these techniques are bad in and of themselves. They become bad when they are used inappropriately.
When cutting a scene I ask myself what is trying to be conveyed in that scene. Let's say the character is sad, and we want the audience to know that. My job then becomes finding the best way to show that. It could mean using a close up to show them crying. It could mean using a locked off wide shot to show them surrounded by a lonely environment. There's never a single best answer, and that's in part why I enjoy my job so much.
Likewise when it comes to long takes and special effects, both have their place but both are misused. Again, ask yourself what it is you are trying to convey. If your character is in a fast paced fight in a warehouse, with bad guys all around from above and below coming at him from many directions, it's quite possible that quick cuts can give you a better sense of danger, as well as actually show the action better. One of the drawbacks to long takes tends to be that you are limited in what you can show. If a bad guy drops in through the glass on the other side of the warehouse, in a long take you'd have to pan the camera, and see that action small in the frame. With a cut, you can easily bring the audience across the warehouse to show this action in a medium shot, then instantly bring them back to the hero's reaction.
Another issue with long takes is that they tend to follow the actors and show their backs. You're in a hard spot on this, because we're most interested in where the actor is going, not where they've been, but at the same time seeing someone's back is not very intimate and is a bit disconnecting. This is why long takes work best when nobody is really going anywhere, or when the environment itself is the most important thing to show.
Long takes can be beneficial for action in small spaces, such as a Kung Fu fight or a dance routine. These elements are about physicality and continuity of motion, and being in a small space a long take can easily capture the entirety of that. I love seeing fights with a smoothly flowing camera that preserves the action, just like I love seeing wide shots of musical numbers where there is dancing. All too often, quick cuts are used in these situations to hide things, like the fact that the actor can;t fight or a bad piece of choreography. I think in general any time you use an edit to HIDE something rather than SHOW something, then the quality of your film goes down.
I see a lot of long takes in some films, which appear to have no motivation other than to be long takes, and that hurts the film just as much as if someone threw in a fury of cuts just to make it exciting. Like all techniques, you've got to be really conscious of the implications of using a long take, and what effect it will have. The worst reason to do it is to do it because it's the new cool.
That's nothing Russian Ark.
"2000 Actors. 300 years of Russian History. 33 Rooms at the Hermitage Museum. 3 Live Orchestras. 1 Single Continuous Shot."
That's an hour and a half long with 2,000 people running around choreographed.
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I was with you, until you cited Pirates and Iron Man as shining examples of great cinematic story quality. Both are derivative crap, frankly, and not worth owning the DVD of.
However, the point remains: movies shouldn't be about "flash", be it either CGI or long takes. Only cinema majors give a crap about that stuff. The rest of the public wants a story with unique, memorable characters who tell a story that is in some way relevant to the audience's own lives.
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The mother of all long takes. Will leave you squirming in your seat.
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Timecode is a 97-minute movie where the screen is split in four sections, each one following one character in a single take.
It was shot 15 times total, and the director apparently insisted that the actors wear different clothes each time so there wouldn't be any temptation to edit any two takes together!
I also came here to point this out! Also, Godard's Week-end has a famous 10-minute long take: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNWaKKQih54
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You could have a feature length film in one cut without any waste. It would take a lot of skill to do it well -- from both the cast and the crew.
I have heard of this being done before. I believe in the biz, they call this a 'Play'.
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On second thought, this might actually help his movies watchable.
To bad this didn't happen in time too save Transformers.
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Nope; the two sets (upper and lower ship) were both contiguous sets since the TV series. I don't think there are shots even close to the movie's opening in the TV show (given the nature of TV and when commercials need come in), but the two ship sets were always contiguous, complete with roofs, practical lighting, etc. It's one of the more impressive sets in TV history.
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One side effect I think of the gratuitous CGI is probably that the shots are kept short to keep your eye from paying too much attention to the CGI. If you examine it in detail, it's obvious that it's computer rendered, and thus not as effective. The quick cuts keep shoving "eye candy" at you without making it stand up to the eye.
You might be right, but I suspect that it is more about keeping budgets manageable. If it takes X hours of render farm time to generate 5 seconds of CGI craziness, then generating 3 minute long tracking shots of the same content will take 36 times as much render farm time.
I have an alternate theory too. Many directors that are reaching the height of their careers now, grew up being exposed to MTV's hyper-energetic buzz cut style of videos. For better or worse, MTV was a big change in visual style and has had some far reaching influences.
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Almost the entire first act of Snake Eyes.
I don't understand this at all. Are they assuming that CGI = a green screen? There can be CGI all of any length scene... And what would prevent even a green screen scene from being arbitrarily long?
This article just makes no sense.
You can do a longer take in pure CGI then you can with non-CGI since there are no actors who need to sleep, or camera men knocking over the camera as they nod off 56 hours into the take...
just set it all up, click the button, and go away for a few years hoping the backup generators handle any power outages.
and no mention about Andrei Tarkovsky=fail.
The scene where De Niro (young Vito) is delivering a bad of groceries. That is a great long scene without CGI.
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Excellent long take: Hamlet, Branagh 1996. Act IV Scene VII. Claudius and Laertes conspire to kill Hamlet in the duel. The camera is all over the place; rugs and furniture have to be unnoticably moved and replaced by crew as the camera points to the middle of a circle that it travels. Very impressive scene.
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned Russian Ark as a good candidate for a long shot. This is a one shot ninety minute movie. Very impressive, and awesome scenery as well.
I'm curious, as my opinion was rather different.
you had me at #!
Atonement has an extremely intricate 5-minute continuous tracking shot. You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5dqmUgu0SI
One word: Twi...
you had me at #!
Where is this long crane/motion-control shot? .. link
Somehow the comment thread fooled me. I thought you were commenting on IRREVERSIBLE. Never mind! (Though we could talk about that anyway...)
you had me at #!
The entire movie Timecode (directed by Mike Figgis) is four uninterrupted 90-minute takes, all shot simultaneously and shown on the screen at once (in a four-way split screen). In other words they turned on four cameras at the same time and didn't turn them off for 90 minutes, and put all four images on the screen at once. They shot something like 17 takes.
...but most of the long takes in modern movies are made possible because of CGI being used to hide the shot breaks and camera transitions, fill in walls, remove crew members, and basically do all kinds of stuff that make it appear seemless. A shot that is apparently uncut by no means indicates that no CGI is used. Not that it should bother you much - bad CGI is just like bad lighting, bad editing, bad directing, bad acting, or any other component of film. CGI doesn't kill movies - Michael Bay using CGI does.
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John Ford made lots of famously long takes in his movies, even for the times he made them. (Which of course was over many decades!) They were often outdoors, framed by often highly symbolic arrays of natural objects. They tended to flow organically and to merge with the landscape in a way that could not be attained on a theater stage or a sound stage. A pity the blog author seems not to be aware of Ford's reputation for long takes, offering only a nod to cinema history with a single example from Welles; the rest of his examples are new stuff, fluff compared to Ford's compelling serio-comic American dramas.
Sorry, but when the cinematography, 3D, CGI, long takes etc... are the main selling point in a film, I have to wonder about the film.
One long take? Big deal, they do live stage shows daily. CGI is a contest of who has the newest toy or who can spend most money rather than actually making a good film. I can understand using ether because you need to or for cost reasons, but to do it for most other reasons are pointless. They're gimmicks. At some point the hype will no longer work. Look at 3D, directors immediately started applying it to otherwise blah movies in an effort to make them more appealing. 3D or not, if a movie is crap, it's still going to be crap, it's just in 3D.
And for the love of god, please send every one of these hack directors who think cameras should "duck and weave" (and zoom in constantly) back to film school. No ones head moves side to side 3 feet while standing still. Steady cams were invented for a reason.
The 15 minute gun fight going across multiple streets in Breaking News by Johnnie To should be in there. Just an absurdly long take.
The Iceman Cometh (IMDB; Wikipedia) has incredibly long scenes.
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It's well known that Fred Astaire insisted that his dance numbers be filmed in one, long, take whenever possible. Compare this to some of today's "great" dance numbers composed of so many tiny takes that it looks like the "dancer" wasn't capable of remembering more than a few seconds of the dance at a time.
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I enjoy long cuts too as they can pull you into the movie more and make you "feel" present at the location of the camera. I also respect the planning and difficulty I know is required. So I do pay attention to them.
I think long takes are much easier to achieve using CGI and other special effects. As an old example of effects used to generate a long-take scene, check out: Contact (jodi foster). There is a memory scene where we follow her as a child up to a mirror and then pass through the mirror and follow her downstairs to some other event in time. This was obviously a trick, but the end result achieved the same or greater effect then a o-natural long-cut of old black-and-white days. Still I do really respect those old 5 minute scenes in B&W with a band and dancers and hundreds of extras and smoke in the air and close-ups ... all in one shot - Respect.
My Point: CGI enhances long-cut scenes and makes them affordable for new productions. I hope to see more in the future and do not consider this to exclude CGI.
For a "long cut" music video. Check utube for "Fiona Apple across the universe". I think the entire video is done in 4 cuts but it doesn't feel like it.
I figured there was maybe *one* reel change, didn't know there were more than say five...
you had me at #!
As in - a feature film done in one take. Whether it was one cut or not is another matter.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXIGP6_fNZk
A scene from "The Protector". Really nice example of how a long scene improves any movie.
It's always the same problem of the content and the containing, which one is more important ?
Dogme 95 shared the same ideals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95
Extract:
1. Filming must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic.
3. The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. The film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place.
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable (if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (that is to say that the film takes place here and now).
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The final picture must be transferred to the Academy 35mm film, with an aspect ratio of 4:3, that is, not widescreen. (Originally, the requirement was that the film had to be shot using Academy 35mm film, but the rule was relaxed to allow low-budget productions.)
10. The director must not be credited.
Dogme 95 movies probably have long takes.
I was left stunned by IRREVERSIBLE as well.
I didn't see it in a cinema, but I imagine the reaction was much the same as when I saw the Toronto premiere of Polytechnique (Canadian film of the year, 2009); I'd never seen an audience sit silent and motionless through the whole credits of a film, before.
you had me at #!
How is it the article can mention the take from "Knowing", approximately two minutes, yet overlook the opening scene of "Snake Eyes" (also with Nick Cage), where one shot covered approximately fifteen mintues?
Long shots are not at all new, and they aren't an antidote to CGI. Good scripts are the antidote to CGI.
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"Impossible" camera shots withstanding, Peter Jackson explains (in the documentaries) his excitement at being able to physically carry a virtual camera in scenes such as Balin's Tomb. He walks around with a camera wearing a VR headset and turns a CGI-infested scene into one grounded in real-world mechanics and limitations.
I enjoyed the scenes at the soccer stadium in El secreto de sus ojos. There was definitely some CGI that brings us from a helicopter view right down among the people in the stands.
And watch the camera go out off the ledge and down to follow the suspect as he jumps down to a lower level. (The camera man had a wire harness, and a quick crew behind him.)
That was pretty impressive filming, along with an interesting story and great acting. Unfortunately, if you have trouble understanding Argentinian Spanish, you'll have to read subtitles.
I think a "long shot" can also be relative: not necessarily long, but it seems that way because it's longer than you expect. In Hell's Angels (1930) there's a wonderful shot during a bombing raid on a munitions dump. Shot straight down from the plane, we see the bomb shrink as it drops, meet its shadow at the target and blow it up, and then the debris spreading out and (perhaps the coolest part) some debris coming back up towards the plane, and getting rather close.
The whole shot is probably far less than a minute long, but it's absolutely riveting and even seems "too long" because the shot ends long after you expect. Of course, you expect more cuts and angles because such scenes are basically always filmed that way. (A partial exception is Major Kong riding the bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove, but even then the camera partially moves down with Kong and the bomb.) There's always at least one shot of the bombs dropping from the side, and several cuts from the ground of explosions, often with fast editing and different angles to "add drama," I suppose, but it's 100% predictable.
The shot in Hell's Angels also works well because it keeps us in the point of view of our protagonists in the bomber, as if we are actually there, which makes it feel much more realistic than the same action would with multiple changes of camera position.
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It's de Palma, who does gets a mention as being the long take master in there somewhere
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Sorry, not impressed. 99% of long takes are just directors showing off. They drive me nuts, because in the vain attempt to demonstrate skill, the director winds up calling attention to himself and either robbing the audience of reaction shots, or swinging the camera wildly as if an earthquake had hit the set. Spare me the artsy "look at me, I'm so talented and trendy" crap and give me a movie that actually tells a story in the best way possible instead of trying to wow the brainless "in" crowd.
In Jean-Claude Van Damme lastest movie, there are 2 long takes. At the beginning there is a 3 minutes take with a lot of explosions, stunts, all choreographed perfectly (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI5W1YPJFBM).
And a the middle of the film there is a 6 minutes monologue all in one take.
I'm not a fan of Van Damme, but this movie is really original and blurs the frontier between fantasy with reality. And it's funny too (a lot of self derision!)
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Everyone is talking about films that are nothing but a long continuous take. Frankly, who cares about that. Here are two that come to mind where the long continuous take has a purpose:
The opening scene from "The Player", not sure how many minutes but a LOT happens.
My personal favorite is from "The Stuntman" (Peter O'Toole). If you've seen the movie you know the scene.
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