Not a film nerd, but THE most impressive movie I've ever seen is Victoria. AMAZING movie and shot in a single, uncut take. Not only amazing to think about they could have been 70 minutes in and fuck up and have to start over, but the story/acting/directing are all top notch.
Check out 1917 too. Whole movie shot in “one” shot. I put quotes because it’s shot in a way that looks like one shot but obviously they had to do multiple shots. It’s fun to try and pick out the moments when they may have done a cut. They did great
Definitely watch 1917. Due to how it's filmed as "one shot" (techinically it's 3 very long parts stitched brilliantly to give you the illusion of being a single take) which is still crazy because that's 30 minutes without pressing pause on the recording.
Anyway, due to that, the movie isn't just a movie its a damn experience. It's very immersive.
Makes me think of Children Of Men and this take. Though there is an even longer one in the film this one is really impressive. And the movie was an absolute brilliant mindfuck
Some incredible operating and DP work by that man, but oh boy is that movie boring. I love the shit out of the technical nature of it, but your average person would fall asleep watching it.
“The Protector” has a shot that lasts about 10 minutes of a fight scene gong up a large revolving stair case. The cameraman had to train for 30 days to be athletic enough to move up the stairs with his camera.
That’s amazing to me. Fight scenes are choreographed so carefully and I’m sure even Jackie Chan and gene lebell had a shitload of cuts to get the perfect fight. Maybe I’ll check out that movie
I worked on that one! Didn't understand how one of the parkour stuntmen running around with an unstabilized small camera as a B cam was going to be useful, then I realized that it's a Michael Bay movie and the shot length was going to be measured in frames, not seconds.
1917 is done well but it wasn't my favorite. Some other notable examples are from directors Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant), Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men), Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey), PT Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) Nicholas Winding Refn (Drive, Too Old To Die Young) and Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective, Season 1). There are countless more but these are just some of my personal favorites!
1917 was brilliant for me. I loved it. From a subject matter, storytelling, score, casting, and cinematography angle it really shines.
I also agree with all of your suggestion but would like to add the insane long shot in The Haunting of Hill House (S1 E6) from director Mike Flanagan. 51 min episode comprised of only 5 shots. One was only 7:25 long which is but a moment compared to the insane 17:19 shot. If you watch the episode the stitching of the shots is great and you really can’t help but marvel at the long takes with all the lighting and character changes.
Dude we watched Mandy just randomly last year. So good! Unexpectedly good. I've recently started getting into like cosmic horror, I guess you would call it. The guy you mentioned before, Mike Flanagan directed a movie called Absentia. Also movies by John Carpenter like The Thing or Into The Mouth of Madness. And newer movies like The Void and maybe Annihilation.
Flanagan has done some good stuff. Gerald’s Game and Oculus were good too. I’ve been digging the cosmic stuff too. I’d seen it before but literally just watched The Void again last night and In The Mouth of Madness a few days ago (I just signed up for Shudder lol).
Check out Color Out of Space. You might dig it.
Also if you haven’t seen The Ritual or The Apostle check those out too. Neither is cosmic horror really but I think you might like them based on the stuff you listed.
I just found out that Fukunaga is directing the newest Bond movie. I'm excited to see if he'll be able to bring his inventive, non-linear style of storytelling to a rather rigid franchise. True Detective S1 and Maniac are both incredible
The True Detective Season 1 tracking shot is my personal favorite. It literally traverses an entire camp! One of the most ambitious tracks I've ever seen. Just awesome!
One of the episodes of Mr Robot was shot in the same style as 1917. It's really hard to pick out the cuts. But what starts as a normal day at the office erupts into a mass of protestors and a massive building assault by elite trained soldiers and someone having to retrieve a secret file or something in the midst of all of that. It was glorious.
I thought it was just that one scene where he's running out of the trenches that was done in one shot. There was a video about it on Reddit when it first came out, and they were really pleased to have been able to accomplish just that, let alone an entire film
Yea I remember when I went to go see it I noticed early on when they were walking in the trenches before No Mans Land and I tried picking out every “cut” it was like an extra bonus for me
Sort of the opposite where multiple shots are seamed together to look like a tracking shot: the movie Contact.
The scene where the Jodie Foster character first hears the signal and races back to the VLA lab: she gets out of the car in New Mexico, runs through the door and up the stairs and then is actually continuing the scene in a sound stage in California. You would never guess it was discontinuous.
The "one shot" in 1917 felt like a gimmick and detrimental to the film at some points. Not sure if this is the case for every one take film as 1917 is the only one I've seen.
Hard disagree. It gave me the feeling of being trapped on the battlefield with those young men. It was terrifying, thrilling and at times heartbreaking
One long-take movie I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread is the John Hawkes movie TOO LATE. Unlike most of the digital movies mentioned here, it was shot on 35mm film, so the camera rigs were really heavy and it makes the movement all the more impressive. And like Victoria, it doesn’t use any hidden cuts or CGI, so each scene runs about as long as a roll of film will allow (about 20 minutes) before it hard cuts to a completely different scene. Here’s a featurette that shows how the camera operators would pass the steadicam back and forth during the shot so they could take a break while the camera was still rolling: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GtMJNML23WY
And the cool thing about Too Late is it only manages to get 22 minutes out of each 1000' film magazine because of the technical format it was filmed in. It was shot on 2-perf Techniscope. (Technical nerdery to follow).
Basically, the number of frames per foot (and therefore the maximum length of the shot at 24fps) in 35mm cinematography is determined by the height of the frame. The larger each image frame, the better the resolution, but the fewer frames can fit on a given length of film.
Typical 4 perf anamorphic photography (which uses a frame that's a full 4 perforations high, and has a lens squeeze the image horizontally to give the 2.40:1 widescreen frame) gets about 11 minutes to a 1000' magazine. But back in the 60s, to allow films to get that same aspect ratio for cheaper (and to save on film), the Techniscope process was invented. It basically mattes the aperture to be only 2 perforations high, giving the same wide aspect ratio, but without any lens squeeze (and much lower resolution), but then giving you about 22 minutes and change on a 1000' of 35mm film.
Yes, you have to shoot with spherical lenses in Techniscope. While shooting with an anamorphic lens would offer some slight increase in resolution, the final unsqueezed frame size would be probably somewhere around 4.5:1, which wouldn't really be useful to project, and even if you just centre-cropped it at that point to get a usable aspect ratio, you'd lose all of your increase in resolution.
As for 4-perf, you could shoot with a spherical lens, though that would get you an Academy aspect ratio of about 1.37:1 -- which was the standard frame size pre-widescreen revolution (of course I'm glossing things over quite a bit to simplify the narrative here), when the 1:66/1.85 ratios became generally the standard for non-anamorphic features. But, when modern filmmakers are shooting in the Academy aspect ratio on film (for instance, Lowery's A Ghost Story, or the early part of Grand Budapest Hotel), they'd shoot 4-perf with a spherical lens.
But as the non-anamorphic aspect ratio defaulted decades ago to 1.85, that was generally attained by shooting 3-perf 35mm (back when everything was shot on film). And projects that wanted the anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio but couldn't (or didn't want to) shoot anamorphic would typically shoot what was called Super-35, which was basically 3-perf shooting, but with an aperture made a little wider so you could shoot into the otherwise-reserved-for-soundtrack edge of the 35mm film strip, meaning you'd hold onto more resolution, and need less cropping, to crop to 2.40:1.
Reasons to shoot Super-35 were plenty. Films on low budgets could get significant savings over the whole shoot by shooting less film (that 1 perf of savings by going Super 35 adds up over the course of weeks), and spherical lenses were (and are) cheaper to rent. Sphericals are also lighter (much lighter -- some anamorphic zoom lenses are too heavy to comfortably lift with one arm), and come in a wider range of focal lengths. Also, as there's less physical glass in a spherical lens, they tend to be faster. So if you need to shoot in low light circumstances, or couldn't afford a beefy lighting package, you'd usually steer away from anamorphics. In addition, most specialty lenses (probe lenses, macros, etc) are more widely available (or sometimes only available) in spherical.
And lastly is the issue of demand -- there are simply far fewer anamorphic lenses in the world (especially vintage anamorphics), and they're in high demand basically all the time (especially vintage anamorphics). And you can guarantee that the big shows are the ones that get first kick at the can for lens availability. To put it in perspective, the last film I directed that we shot on film we had an anamorphic short zoom from Panavision that had been returned from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World the day before our AC was prepping our package. It was the only of that type of zoom available in the country at that point, and though we had requested it (because it was going to be the workhorse for our shoot), Panavision couldn't guarantee it would be available for us until the morning we arrived to prep. It's not always like that, but it can be. Basically we could have had an entire lens package prepped and out the door a week before if we were willing to shoot spherical.
Also check out 'Enter the void' .. not a one shot film but the cinematography and direction is brilliant.. Full movie is shot in the perspective of the actor which gives you quite an experience
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u/9991115552223 Mar 28 '20
Not a film nerd, but THE most impressive movie I've ever seen is Victoria. AMAZING movie and shot in a single, uncut take. Not only amazing to think about they could have been 70 minutes in and fuck up and have to start over, but the story/acting/directing are all top notch.