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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?
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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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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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.
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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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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Any list without the long take that opens The Player is suspect.
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Yeah but you can' really - SQUIRREL!
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'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.
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.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
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!
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.
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.
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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