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.

Comments

And the opposite

[fyngyrz]

...is part of why I abandoned TV, and even the news -- I *despise* the tiny little takes, the snappy transitions, the sound bites. I find them deeply unsatisfying, shallow, and in the end not a good use of my time.

Re:And the opposite

[windcask]

I *despise* the tiny little takes, the snappy transitions, the sound bites.

Let me say that while I agree with you, there's something to be said for economy in editing. One of the things I hate about many amateur Youtube videos is they have no sense of rhythm or purpose. They dwell on a shot for 10-15 seconds when the focal point only takes five.

While I agree that soundbites in this day and age are often exploited to provide a shallow and one-sided point of view, the interconnectedness of the world allows us to see these as brief summaries and delve into the context more as necessary, ultimately providing us a better use of our time. For example: I heard President Obama comment on his "shellacking" on the radio Thursday before last, basically admitting his defeat. Thanks to my interest in the subject, I was able to look up the speech on Youtube and see the larger scope of what he was talking about, how it will help him mature as a president.

Re:And the opposite

[DragonWriter]

Let me say that while I agree with you, there's something to be said for economy in editing.

Sure, you don't want wasted time in film. Long cuts, however, don't need to have wasted time -- especially if the screenplay is tight. (Of course, that also requires the actors to be sharp, and everything else to be done right the first time.)

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.

Henry V

[hedronist]

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.

Problem Solved

[Tekfactory]

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.

Impossible camera moves and the like

[jollyreaper]

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.

Disappointing a geek article would omit "Serenity"

[TofuMatt]

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.

You think long takes AREN'T CGI?

[Bruce Perens]

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!

Re:You think long takes AREN'T CGI?

[Bruce Perens]

Well, if your favorite is a live action long take, there's nothing to beat Gene Kelly's dance in "Singin' in the Rain", which has exactly ONE cut in the whole scene, quite far into it." In more modern work there's the Old Spice ad "I'm on a horse!", which has CGI at one point but it's still one take.

I'll happily ignore your art criticism. Although I was not involved with the Kahn CGI, I consider it one of the high moments in CGI film art. Certainly there is lots of art in the Pixar films in which I was involved, which contain no live action at all, and no rotoscoping.

X-FILES

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's a reaction to MTV, not CGI.

[Animats]

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.

Re:Rope! Actor also in Gun Crazy

[shoor]

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.

Bruce Lee vs other martial arts movies.

[DMUTPeregrine]

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.