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- The Ultimate Tracking Shot
Hello Hollywood tech nerds!
In this week’s post:
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The Ultimate Tracking Shot
What’s your favorite oner? Mine is from the underappreciated Brian De Palma film Raising Cain, which you can see below.
At just over 4 minutes long, this is a banger, traversing multiple staircases, an elevator, and multiple wrong turns by one of the characters. All filmed with a Steadicam back in the early 1990s!
There are of course many classic one take tracking shots, from Touch of Evil to The Player to Children of Men. Modern films often include these as well, although the showier attempts at oners typically use some level of digital augmentation or stitching, as in the films 1917 and Birdman. De Palma himself even engaged in some editing trickery for the oner that opens Snake Eyes.
All this in mind, it was super cool to learn about Netflix’s new show Adolescence, where each episode is itself a oner!
Featuring around 320 extras, each episode was filmed in a four-week block that mostly comprised technical practices and rehearsals. The final week would feature two takes per day, leaving the team with 10 to choose from at the end of the week.
That is crazy! Imagine being the guy who blows a line shooting one of those takes. It would be like my high school production of The Pirates of Penzance where I accidentally sung “I am the very model of a modem Major-General” and was summarily thrown off the cast and replaced by a young Chris Evans.
One of the grips from Adolescence took some cell phone video of how they accomplished just a small part of the shoot:
Netflix itself has provided some cool BTS and other interesting stuff on the making of the show. In show co-creator and co-star Stephen Graham’s interview with the LA Times, the production of the show sounds like the very definition of a well-oiled production machine:
Shooting the episodes in one take required cinematographer Matt Lewis and camera operator Lee David Brown to work in tandem. They passed the camera between them to ensure continuity and everything was choreographed with exact precision, including how to transition between locations seamlessly and how to move characters in and out of cars. The second episode culminates with a chase sequence into a drone shot — an impressive feat that took several tries to get right.
“It was like a ballet, like a beautiful dance,” Graham says of the collaborative effort on set. “There was a lovely fluidity of movement to it. The process is very engrossing as a performer. And it’s unique. We don’t get the opportunity to do it, but it’s the most amazing experience to do as an actor.”
From what I’ve gleaned from the BTS, the camera used during production is the DJI Ronin 4D. Pretty cool!
The Future of Streaming TV is… Syndication?
Longtime readers may be annoyed that I’m returning to one of my long-running obsessions (AVOD, FAST channels, and the limited quality of tech “disruption” to entertainment), but as Michael Corleone said:
What pulled me back in this time is Variety’s article titled “Syndication of Streaming Originals Will Be the Next Content Trend.” Duh!
Late last year, NBCUniversal licensed all four seasons of sitcom “A.P. Bio” — which began its run as an NBC series before moving exclusively to Peacock for its final two seasons — to Netflix.
The show soon received the coveted “Netflix bounce,” with viewership spiking significantly; “A.P. Bio” was one of the top 10 streaming originals in the U.S. for three weeks between November and December, according to Nielsen, and its first season alone spent two weeks among the 10 most streamed TV seasons on Netflix, per the service’s own data.
On a more granular level, daily viewership for “A.P. Bio” skyrocketed following its Netflix debut, according to Luminate streaming viewership data. Season 1 jumped from a daily average of about 232,000 minutes streamed in the month prior to more than 24 million in the month following.
That anyone is surprised by this stuff happening indicates a mindset that has completely forgotten how television functioned for decades… or even one’s own memory of watching Seinfeld reruns on TBS.
Audiences want quality shows! Audiences want access to quality shows! Audiences do not want to have to have subscriptions to 8 different streaming platforms in order to watch quality shows! If you meet people where they are, they will watch your show.
It’s not as though we didn’t know these things. We did! We have simply allowed tech disruption to crash the business unnecessarily, and only now are we returning to the models that created revenue for decades.
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
How creators are licensing content to train AI. (link)
Making an onscreen skull surgery look real on 1923. (link)
IMAX’s new live event innovations. (link)