The Oner - Television Tropes & Idioms

One very long continuous shot. The camera moves, the actors move, things happen, the camera keeps shooting. Difficult. Expensive. Rarely makes it out of the editing room intact.

This used to be much more common, since before Desi Arnaz's Three Cameras technique and pre-shooting on film became popular, most TV shows were done live with just one camera.

Examples:

Loved to the point of overuse by Joss Whedon. Though his intro to the crew at the beginning of the Firefly movie Serenity was filmed like a oner, it actually needed two shots because of the configuration of the ship sets.
- As well, the filming of the song "I'll Never Tell" from the Buffy musical episode was done in one take.
The Mad About You episode "The Conversation" (Paul and Jamie are anguished about whether to leave Mabel alone through the night, not going to her when she cries) was filmed in a single shot, except for The Teaser and The Tag. (They then apply Lamp Shade Hanging in The Tag, when Paul and Jamie are watching and discussing a movie filmed in that way. Jamie can't understand why anyone would go through all the effort to do that.)
Probably the best TV example of this is The X Files episode "Triangle", featuring an alternate-reality Scully and a modern-day Mulder thrown into her 1939 world. Though the show actually had a few cuts, each act was one continuous shot.
The 2003 film Russian Ark was filmed in a single shot that lasted over 90 minutes. This historical drama took place in the Russian State Hermitage Museum and involved over 2,000 actors.
Robert Altman's The Player had an eight-minute single-cut intro.
Hitchcock's Rope was made "continuous" by irritating closeups of a back or whatnot to allow changing reels.
- Technically, there are a total of ten cuts in the entire film, counting the opening of the first reel. Of those, half are disguised by having an actor or a prop in front of the camera; the other half are simply done as regular cuts.
The final, Quentin Tarantino-directed segment of Four Rooms. Other Tarantino examples:
- In Pulp Fiction, the scene with Jules and Vincent in the apartment building hallway at the beginning is one shot.
- In Jackie Brown, the opening credits of Jackie on a moving sidewalk were a single shot.
- In Kill Bill Vol. 1, the part in the House of Blue Leaves where Sofie Fatale leaves O-Ren's dining room and goes into the restroom was one long shot.
- In Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Blonde walking to his car to retrieve gasoline in order to light an captured, beaten, and tortured cop on fire.
The "hallway rampage" sequence of Chanwook Park's Oldboy.
The tour of a London neighborhood at night at the start of Absolute Beginners is an even more extreme example, as it is also a complete musical number as well.
An even earlier cinematic use, possibly even the first, was in the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which begins with a three-minute continuous shot which moves between two interiors across a large set -- both technically and aesthetically daring for the time. Even more impressively, this shot is from Jekyll's point of view.
- At one point the camera-as-Jekyll even looks in a mirror; the production had the actor standing on the other side of a glassless frame, with a duplicated section of room-scenery behind him.
Other movie examples: Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory, Brian DePalma's Raising Cain and Snake Eyes, and Orson Welles' opening shot in Touch of Evil.
Third Watch's 100th episode, "A Call For Help" consisted of 4 The Oners, each comprising about 10 minutes of screentime.
Impressively, the Thai martial arts action movie Tom Yum Goong (known in the US as The Protector and the UK as Warrior King, starring Tony Jaa) features a four-minute one-shot elaborate fight sequence that reportedly took eight days to get right in which Tony Jaa fights his way up a building.
Children of Men features a number of these, with a degree of special effects assistance which has not been completely revealed. It's known that some of the shots used bluescreen effects, and some were stitched together cleverly from short takes, but it's not clear where the seams are.
- Actually, it's quite easy to see where two segments were stitched together at one point. Towards the end of the film, after Luke takes Kee but before Theo gets her back, at one point a person is shot and small droplets of blood spatter the camera lens. After about a minute or two, the blood is gone, even though it looks like there haven't been any cuts.
- In fact, Alfonso Cuaron seems to enjoy these - there's a couple of sequences in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that use this, such as a panning shot starting outside Hogwarts and going inside to see our heroes around three-quarters of the way in.
John Woo's Hard-Boiled includes a two-minute and forty-two second long take of Tequila (Chow Yun-Fat) and Alan (Tony Leung) clearing room after room of bad guys during the big shootout at the hospital. The Criterion edition of this Hong Kong action classic actually has a chapter dedicated to this sequence called "2 Minutes, 42 Seconds."
In an audio example, the Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama series "Cyberman" was done in a single take from start to finish, with everyone in the studio at the same time and special effects being added in real time.
- The Doctor Who story "Scherzo" is also done this way, as it involves only The Doctor and his companion talking for all 4 episodes.
The movie Postcards From The Edge starts with a scene lampshading this practice; a misspoken line threatens to ruin the entire shot.
The Friends episode "The One Where No One's Ready" consisted of a single continuous shot.
- Erm, that would be a no. With the exception of the credits sequence, it's in real time and shot on one set (the girls' apartment), but before the teaser's even over there have been a dozen cuts.
Scrubs season one episode "My Student" began with a two-and-a-half minute Cold Opening. DVD special features show that the primary technical difficulty was actor Don Faison's inability to sink a three-pointer on cue.
Cannon Fodder, the third segment of Katsuhiro Otomo's Memories is over twenty minutes long, but consistes of a single, long shot.
The two-minute date at the end of the How I Met Your Mother episode "Ten Sessions". (better known as the one with Britney Spears.)
The Honda car advert "Cog" is a Rube Goldberg machine filmed in one continuous shot--except that the warehouse they were shooting in was too small, so it was divided in half and CGI'd together in the middle. It's about two minutes long, and took over two hundred takes to work.
- Six hundred and six, actually.
- Cog is a fairly blatant unauthorized appropriation of ''The Way Things Go'', which is a true oner that won all kinds of film awards.
The 'FPS sequence' in the movie version of Doom was like this set up to look like this.
The scene in Goodfellas where Henry Hill takes his girlfriend to the nightclub, past the line at the door, in through the kitchen and out into the club is a well known example. After three takes, Scorsese's assistant director asked if they could take a break because the extras were getting tired. Scorsese had not realized that, to save money, the extras outside the club were also the extras for the interior, and had to run in and get in place while the camera was in the kitchen.
Rare in James Bond movies, but in You Only Live Twice, there's a extended helicopter tracking shot as Bond runs across a roof, beating up dock workers working for the villain.
Perhaps the most disturbing example of The Oner comes in Kubrick's film of A Clockwork Orange, in which Alex's head is forced into an (obviously full) water trough while he is brutally beaten (complete with zany 'bong' sound effects). After about a minute of watching Malcolm McDowell struggle frantically, this editor's brother turned to him and said, horrified: "This is all one shot." Apparently there was actually a breathing apparatus under the water, but it failed to work properly and McDowell did, indeed, nearly drown.
Animated example: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron opens with one of these, following a bald eagle over various natural landmarks in America's Old West. It was one of the first sequences started during production and one of the last to be finished.
Be Kind Rewind has a nice Oner where we see a bunch of films getting edited (?) simultaneously.
All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930 version has a rather long shot of French soldiers getting mowed down.
While they aren't true oners a lot of older musicals have dance numbers with few cuts. "Fit as a Fiddle" from Singin' in the Rain is done in about 4 shots max and Make 'em Laugh has a Oner where Donald O'Connor does two back flips in a row off two walls.
The Dark Knight, The Joker, a hospital, a lot of bombs, some of them even going off.

Music videos done as Oners:

Spice Girls, "Wannabe." Actually three shots, broken up by what looks like two very short pans over and "through" walls.
OK Go, "A Million Ways" (an elaborately choreographed dance sequence) and "Here It Goes Again" (an elaborately choreographed dance sequence on treadmills).
Eagle-Eye Cherry, "Save Tonight."
Jamiroquai, "Virtual Insanity."
Lisa Loeb, "Stay."
"Smack My Bitch Up", also filmed in first person with a Tomato In The Mirror ending.
"Nothing Compares 2 U" by Sinead O'Connor - a Oner of Sinead's head looking straight to the camera. Intercut with some shots of her moping around a park in Paris at the insistence of the studio, who had paid to film her in Paris, dammit, and were going to get their money's worth.
Tom Petty's "You Don't Know How It Feels" was once credited as the most expensive single-shot music video to date.
REM's "Imitation Of Life" is an oddity: a very short single-shot video, where the music video is made by continually playing it forward and in reverse while panning around the footage to highlight certain aspects at the right time.
Coldplay, "Yellow."
Feist, "1234."
Lucas, "Lucas with the Lid Off". Amazingly complex, with some weird Escher-esque perspective tricks, and yet it was still filmed in a single take.
Radiohead's "No Surprises" video is notable, in that the continuous 57 seconds in which Thom Yorke is submerged was done by speeding up the track Thom is miming to as his face becomes totally submerged, then editing the footage to slow it down for the full minute.
Nine Inch Nails - "March Of The Pigs"
Primus - Mr. Krinkle
The Smashing Pumpkins - "Ava Adore". Notable for having several sections slowed down or sped up to create graceful or oddly jerky motions.
Jars of Clay - "Work".
Traci Bonham, "Mother Mother."
Miley Cyrus, Start All Over
Linkin Park's "Bleed It Out" video shows a bar fight in reverse as the band preforms on stage in "forward time". It looks good and was done through a combination of greenscreen and carefully timed tracking shots. As opposed to...
... Mute Math's video "Typical" where the band had to preform the song from "finish to start" reversing the lyrics so their lips sinc up when the music is dubbed over.
On a similarly backwards note, Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water", directed by Michel Gondry, is a really interesting example. The same single shot runs forwards on one side of the screen and backwards on the other side - and yet there is interaction between the two sides.
Nick Cave & PJ Harvey's "Henry Lee"
Animusic's The Drum Machine.
Spoon's Video for The Underdog is one long tracking shot following several people through various halls and rooms of the studio passing the relevant musician as each new musical element is introduced
Fastball's "Fire Escape". There's a twist at the end where the actress in the video can't open the door to the car, and as she storms away angrily, the director yells "Cut!" and tells the crew that they're going to shoot the entire video all over again.
Sky's Some Kind of Wonderful.
The Tea Party's Babylon.
Semisonic's "Closing Time" is two parallel Oners shown side-by-side.

Nostril Shot

« Camera Tricks »

Orbital Shot

On A Soundstage All Along

« Music Video Tropes »

Performance Video

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools