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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.

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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. The cuts are disguised with Whip Pans.
• As well, the filming of the song "No Parking" from the Buffy musical episode was done in one take. The camera starts on Giles, Xander and Anya, then pans over to Marti Noxon singing before rejoining the Scoobies' conversation.
  • One of the opening scenes of The Body was shot as a oner, which adds to the realism of the episode.
  • Maybe the first one to show up in the series is the first episode of season three, as the gang returns to school.
• And to complete the Whedon Trilogy, the intro of the AI gang on their first day of work at Wolfram & Hart was a oner, and featured every starring member of the cast.
• 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.
• The West Wing opened the series with a long one (Leo arriving for work) and came close to closing the series with a similar one (POTUS Bartlet thanking all of the minor staffers, including a funny inside joke between Martin Sheen and his real-life daughter).
• The X Files episode "Triangle", features 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. This results in a beautiful moment in the first scene back with the original Scully. Skinner flubs a line, and manages to correct in character, but collects a Death Glare from Gillian Anderson along the way. Apparently she was really tired of doing that damned scene.
• 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. The effort is amazing, the behind the scenes material is intimidating ... and the the resulting film is, unfortunately, a Dancing Bear.
• 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.
  • None of them are real cuts, though- the camera had to be changed and stopped, and the action had to be broken off, but the actual shot is continuous.
• 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 a captured, beaten, and tortured cop on fire.
  • In Thunderbolt / Death Proof, a conversation in a coffee shop around half-way through.
• 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. 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.
  • The in-car sequence required a complex rig that was placed on top of the car so there would be no equipment in the car aside from the camera itself while it was moving. CGI was used heavily to add elements that would have been impossible to film traditionally, as well as replacing parts of the car that had to be removed.
  • 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.
  • And again, in Y Tu Mama Tambien, during the scene where the boys are driving the car.
  • Another example from Cuaron: the kiss under the rain in Great Expectations.
• 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.
    • Actually, this isn't particularly unusual for the series — because of the recording technology at the time, the very early shows HAD to be made like this; although the cameras can be cut between, the action (with sound effects) had to be done in a single take. The very first episode consists of a few long takes, sometimes with special effects sequence edited to join them later. It's alleged that due to a lack of recording time, at least one episode ("Galaxy Four", ep4) was transmitted live.
• The movie Postcards From The Edge starts with a scene lampshading this practice; a misspoken line threatens to ruin the entire shot.
• 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 six hundred takes to work. Six hundred and six, in fact.
  • 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 Way Things Go, however, isn't a true oner. It's got several cuts, disguised Rope-style by doing crossfades on closeups of things like trays full of foam.
• 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.
  • The reason the shot is so long is that while Scorsese was allowed to film at the real Copacabana club, he couldn't use the main entrance.
  • The main stumbling block on the shot was Henny Youngman, playing himself as the entertainer at the end of the shot; he kept flubbing his lines after the rest of the shot was completed successfully.
• 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. It is also awesome.
• 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). 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.
• The Longest Day has an immensely long shot in which a helicopter follows the French resistance storming a few blocks in a long stretch that was masterfully orchestrated.
• Propaganda pic I Am Cuba has some incredibly long takes filmed from the back of moving cars, and in one, which follows the coffin of a dead student through crowded streets, the camera goes up the sides of a building, through the top floor, and then out again along a balcony...It was done by having the camera passed along a 'bucket line' of volunteers!
• Darren Aaronofsky's The Wrestler has two extended sequences which follow its protagonist from just behind his shoulders.
• The 2000 film Time Code consists of four continuous 90-minute shots, each filmed in a single simultaneous take. Each shot follows different parts of the action, and is displayed in a quadrant of a splitscreen.
• Big Fat Liar actually does one of these very well, in Jaleel White's introductory scene at an on-location film shoot. The DVD deleted scenes contain an even longer cut of the same shot.
• Cloverfield has a lot of these, due to its premise of the camera being operated by one of the main characters.
• The opening sequence of Orson Well's Touch of Evil features one of the most famous continuous camera shots. John Carpenter cites it as inspiration for the opening scene in his film Halloween.
• The opening scene of the film "The Player" is an 8 minute continuous tracking shot. The scene hangs a lampshade by having a couple of guys walk through while discussing famous continuous tracking shots from other films.
• Ed Burtynski's documentary Manufactured Landscapes opens with an alarmingly long shot of a Chinese factory floor—nearly ten minutes of assembly lines and work benches.
• Shaun Of The Dead has two oners of Shaun walking from his flat, across the street to the store, and back. One of them takes place before the Zombie Apocolypse and one is after.
• A masterful Oner is the opening scene of Strange Days, taking about five minutes with a handicam and several physical stunts (like climbing a ladder and jumping off a building) and ends with the POV cameraman/character falling off a roof and dying.
• The long Steadicam shot in "The Formula", including the men walking down flights of stairs while talking.
• When Robbie first comes to the beach in Atonement, there's a oner that follows him as he takes in all the carnage. It's five and a half minutes long, required a thousand extras to film, and Steadicam operator Peter Robertson collapsed after it was finished.
• Boogie Nights has several of these, including the opening, the pool party, the scene where Little Bill shoots his wife, her lover, and himself, and the ending.
• Cry Wolf has a rather impressive Oner with an extremely steady cameraman —- no dolly used, even. It goes over all sorts of rough terrain and just looks impressive.
• David Copperfield employs these for several of his "make enormous things disappear" tricks.
• Both Henry V films have one (no pun intended). Olivier's 1944 version had the charge of the French cavalry at the beginning of the Battle of Agincourt. Branagh's 1989 version had the king walking the battlefield at the end of the same battle.
• Ghostbusters had one in Louis's apartment during his party. The entire shot was also ad libbed by Rick Moranis.
• Irréversible consists entirely of Oners shown in reverse order. One contains a murder, another a rape.
• $la$her$ appears to be shot entirely in one continuous take done by the cameraman of a murder reality show. The cuts were actually disguised by being done when no actor was on camera, but there's still fewer than one cut per 10 minutes of action throughout the movie.
• The first sequence of Living in Oblivion is about an independent director's attempt to get an emotionally charged scene in one shot. He suffers every setback in the industry.
• The pull-back from inside Audrey's apartment at the end of Somewhere That's Green and out into the street up to the top of a building for the beginning of Some Fun Now in Little Shop Of Horrors was one continuous shot, achieved with a crane mounted on a crane.
• The opening shot of "The Day After Tomorrow" is the longest CGI generated one-shot, it goes for at least a couple of minutes.
• The first post-credits sequence of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica mini-series is a 3 minute 15 second steadicam shot running around the upper levels of the ship, with almost every named crew member wandering through.

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."
• Prodigy, "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.

  Link note: apparently the soundtracks have been removed from all the versions online, so you can watch it, but not listen.

• 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" and "I Feel It All".
• 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. The making of this video is featured in the band's documentary Meeting People is Easy, which shows Thom's frustrations with being unable to do the shot correctly for several takes.
• 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.
  • Their second video, "Spotlight", is another Oner, sped up from an approximately 12-minute shoot to match the song. Some parts are sped up more than others, such as when they move the piano into the van. It was actually finished on the first take.
• 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 "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.
  • Destiny's Child's cover of "Emotion" ups the split-screen count to three.
• Vampire Weekend's "Oxford Comma" and "A-Punk".
• Massive Attack have two of the best-known videos of this type: "Unfinished Sympathy" and "Protection".
• Jack Johnson's Sitting, Waiting, Wishing. Done backwards in addition to being a oner.
• While we're at it, God Lives Underwater's video for From Your Mouth is also a backwards oner. Strangely hypnotic, if a little disgusting.
• Puffy Ami Yumi's Nice Buddy is set up like this, but considering that, at one point, 8 identical versions of one of the singers runs past the screen...
• The video for Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream had 5 shots in total for video lasting more than 3 minutes. Whole not a Oner, the long shots are notable.
• Metric's Gimme Sympathy. They even let you see how they did it.
• Elton John's 'I Want Love' is shot like this, following Robert Downey, Jr as he lip-syncs to the song. (Downey, allegedly, kept wanting to gesture with his hands; allegedly, they taped them into his pockets to help him avoid that.)

Theatre

• The entirety of every single play or musical ever.
  • Not necessarily true. A scene can be staged or lit in such a way that the focus of the audience can shift in a way similar to a camera cut. Bringing a gun onstage, for example, is pretty much guaranteed to do this, and in the hands of sufficiently skilled actors, it can even be something much more subtle. On the flip-side, a director can also stage a scene that's meant to have the same focal point for the entirety of the scene, ala a Oner.

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