The struggle with a one-shot film is that you have to pick and choose when your “exciting” moments are. So it takes one person to say yes, and then you have a kind of domino effect.

Deakins: I mean, I'm looking at all my weather apps to see when it's gonna cloud over. They were too bulky. But I made sure that when I offered these two lads the role, they understood it was a long job, and that they had to be there as part of the team, from the very beginning of pre-production. [1917 is] not shot in a way that’s designed to draw attention to itself. The feeling that you are going to have to live through the story with them is accentuated by not cutting. This allowed the crew to constantly move forward and follow the characters without making a visible hard cut. You can’t have your story too complicated or there is a lot of risk of ruining a long take.

Cloudy days were more optimal than sunny days, as sunny days meant more shadows. Narrator: Once the camera was on the truck, it had to follow George as he ran for about a quarter of a mile.

The camera could never move backward, only forward, as the characters had a starting point and a fixed destination and could never go back. It seems like just one long, continuous take.

This would also help editor Lee Smith immensely.

in 1917, there is a distinct moment when the camera cuts to black, and the character wakes up at a completely different time of day. So there is a way of communicating now, which is not using the traditional tools, the traditional grammar of cinema that developed the last one hundred years.

1917 opened in limited theaters on Christmas Day. "You'd have to really have a huge understanding of editing, or you would have had to have edited this kind of a film to understand what goes into it," he said. Otherwise, all will die. Refine See titles to watch instantly, titles you haven't rated, etc. It would almost be indecent to ask if he foresees a second Oscar.

Did that make it especially challenging for you or the actors?

Deakins earned a reputation as one of the greatest cinematographers alive today thanks to his masterful work on movies like "Skyfall" and "Sicario." "One-shot" filmmaking follows no fixed path, and directors before Mendes have approached it with varying degrees of fidelity. Ramps allowed the camera to pass from no man's land into the lower German trenches. It’s the first film that experienced director Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty, Road to Perdition) has also written, and I spoke with him by phone about why he decided to make the film seem as if it’s one continuous shot, as well as the challenges of casting a movie like this.

Scale models of production designer Dennis Gassner's sets, built on a backlot at Shepperton Studios and on location up and down the UK, were used to choreograph performances and camera movements ahead of time, and on set rehearsed and rehearsed again. Secondly, the lack of dialogue and interesting characters made for long passages of time where nothing happens. So that I found very stressful. Meanwhile, tunnel entrances had to be the exact right length to accommodate the camera and their cuts. We love Roger Deakins. ", Cinematographer Roger Deakins and director Sam Mendes on the set of "1917.". The crew spent months—six, in fact—in rehearsal, measuring each and every step. (A missed line, a wrong step, a camera-operator error—you name it.) Lost in London starring Woody Harrelson - done in one shot and broadcast live to cinema.

"There’d be times where you’d get seven minutes into the take and someone would trip or a bit of mud would get on the lens or an explosive device would be off and you can’t use it. "Other than suicide, no," Deakins quipped.

And then it climbs up the trench with him as the camera's booming out on the arm. Alissa Wilkinson.

If you look at the same shot behind the scenes, you'll see George running through that same city and jumping off the ledge. Japanese horror movie that came out last year. All of them could not be built or even conceived until we knew how long they should be. "We were trying to make and complete the film as we were shooting," said Smith.

The one thing you can do is adjust rhythm and pace, and I had to know it was exactly as I wanted it, before I moved on. In Hitchock's "Rope" (1948), cuts were masked by panning across characters' dark clothing.

There’s a limited budget, and there’s only so many takes you can do usually. save hide report.

Sam Mendes. What they are asked to do is almost impossibly difficult.

Deakins: We started on a 50-foot technocrane that was armed in from, say, as we're facing George, from the right-hand side.

How is the rehearsal process different for a movie like this from other films?

But it was actually Mendes's work on Spectre, 2015's 007 entry, that first planted the seeds of inspiration for the director. A heavier camera would not have worked with the crew's stabilizers, which were crucial for when the camera operators had to walk and run after the soldiers. If you’re aware of it for the first 10 minutes, then hopefully thereafter you forget about it, and you just watch the story.

Why?' It bears witness to the staggering destruction wrought by the war, and yet it is a fundamentally human story about two young and inexperienced soldiers racing against the clock. I wanted to tell this story in two hours of “real time.” So I felt like it was a natural thing, to lock the audience into the men’s experiences.

Essential to maintaining continuity was lighting -- made trickier by large sections of open-air filming.

Instead, it enhances the viewing experience, truly enveloping audiences in the action—stress, horror, and all. *More like a perfectly stitched together series of oners.

"I’m sure that was very frustrating for Sam at times, but he was good about it. The completed film, releasing in the US on Christmas Day and internationally in January, has thrust Deakins and Smith's names into awards season contention. But then I read it and it's obvious.".

Schofield's journey downriver was captured mostly by a crane. We may earn a commission from these links. Sometimes an object would block the frame.

This gave Deakins the same great image quality but also allowed for more portability and for the camera to more quickly be attached to something like a crane or a drone. This required a lot of rehearsing. And we didn’t know how long they should be until we’d acted it. Why Decision Desk called Pennsylvania, and the presidential race, for Joe Biden, "It became pretty obvious that as the remaining votes across the state and in Philadelphia are counted, Biden’s lead will continue to grow.".

Smith, meanwhile, is content to be the film's "Invisible Man."

Frame by Frame did a really good video on how it worked in Birdman, and its roots with an old Hitchcock movie 60 years ago. Deakins: Creatively, Sam and I talked about it.

Deakins said he's still surprised by which of his films turn in to a hit or not. One window was built to come apart so that the camera could pass through it. And then, is that cloud gonna last long enough to do a five-minute take? Experimental digital movie shot entirely in one take and in real time. Inside the Mind-Boggling Way 1917 Was Filmed to Look Like One Continuous Shot. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. Birdman, which debuted in 2014, is probably the most well-known of recent releases. It needed to be visceral and immersive. But for "1917," walkthroughs were happening well in advance. Getting this shot was a huge endeavor. "It was so realistic. It was ambitious. Getting it right required precise timing, the highest level of planning, and some incredibly clever shooting and editing. It never uses the same location twice.

How did you go about casting for those roles? ", It would have been easy for the technical to out-awe the emotional in theaters. Firstly (spoiler maybe?) The majority of "1917" was filmed on location up and down the UK, standing in for the Western Front.

For example, the barbed wire the two soldiers walk through in no man's land had angled pathways so the camera could get through. The acting could be wonderful and everything else could be right and you’d have to start again. "Pete and Charlie Rizek, who (operated) a Trinity, each of them fell over a couple of times in the trenches," said the cinematographer. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. "[Mendes] called out of the blue and said he was going to be doing something shortly, and could he send me a script?," the cinematographer explained.

Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) enter an orchard in "1917.". Was there ever a contingency plan if a bad match was discovered in post-production?

True one-shot "Victoria" (2015) had Sebastian Schipper direct a bank heist around the streets of Berlin, his cast ad-libbing dialogue while the camera was passed between operators.

One of the earliest examples of a "one shot" film was Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope."