The Oner

"We don't do any of your adorable little quick-cut fights around here. We do everything in a single take."

— Ms. Prestige, Anime Crimes Division

Called a "long take", this is one very long, uninterrupted camera shot. The camera moves, the actors move, things happen, the camera keeps shooting. Difficult. Expensive. Rarely makes it out of the editing room intact. It can also present a logistical challenge, as film cameras once lacked the storage capacity to run for more than 5 minutes at a time — if that. A screw-up means a lot more than just a re-shoot. But when done right, it can be hailed as a directorial triumph, a chance for the performers to show He Really Can Act, and just plain awesome. More so if it's a One-Take Wonder.

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. Modern technology has made Oners easier, as digital cameras can hold much more footage compared to film (the longest magazines, at 2000' could still only hold 55 minutes), and the advent of CGI allows easier stitching of multiple takes, to the point where some are actually shot piecemeal in smaller takes.

Significantly easier in animation, for obvious reasons, but even there, a long shot can still be a pain in the ass, since (1) you effectively have to work on the entire shot as a whole, effectively preventing most division of labor and making any editing rather troublesome and (2) the result almost always needs to be edited for pacing, leading back into problem 1.

Compare Leave the Camera Running, which may also be a long single shot, but is really distinguished by its static-ness. Also compare Epic Tracking Shot, where the camera movements are virtually impossible without some sort of visual trickery. A Sub-Trope of Real Time. Compare with Unbroken First-Person Perspective.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• Philips' commercial entitled "Carousel" is a 2-minute single-shot ad aimed to sell their 21:9 LCD televisions (although it doesn't really do a very good job of telling us that). It consists of a continuous tracking shot of a freeze-frame of a bank heist gone wrong. Bonus points for looping cleanly to make it an endless oner, although it was done in seven shots.
• The Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.
  • The first commercial. It's only 33 seconds long, but so much happens in those 33 seconds that it deserves a spot on here. (Testosterone Poisoning Serial Escalation!)
  • And its sequel, called "Questions". Some of this is even more impressive than the first commercial.
• State Insurance
  • Their 2013 campaign; one minute thirty seconds, featuring car crashes, house fires, and wandering chickens.
  • An earlier one is perhaps more impressive. Note that neither this nor the one above relied on CGI to stitch parts together.
• Honda's "COG", taken in two takes (and only because the room wasn't long enough to fit the whole thing; the splice occurs with the rolling exhaust pipe) after 605 failed attempts.
• The "Man Who Walked Around the World", a six and a half minute advertisement/mini-documentary for Johnnie Walker Whiskey starring Robert Carlyle.
• Reddi-Wip had a sweeping, minute-long 2016 commercial, in which a dancing milkman delivers whipped cream to the cast and crew of NBC's Hairspray Live!
• The 2024 Super Bowl Special for Hoka shoes depicts a flock of tiny runners in the sky, "flying" in the formation of the Hoka logo, and the camera pans over to various runners and back out without any cuts.

Anime

• The first season of Attack on Titan gives us a GORGEOUS one in episode 11 showing Eren swinging and hurtling through Trost, ending with a mid-air titan transformation.
• The first episode of The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses begins with a long tracking shot of the protagonist Kaede arriving at school, walking to his classroom and sitting down at his desk, with his love interest Ai bumping into him on the way there.
• Girls und Panzer:
  • The first scene of puts the camera in the POV of the main characters' tank, and stays in this view for about a minute and a half as they get in and drive past the rest of the team.
  • At the end of the first episode, there is another epic Oner: tracking from the rusted hulk of the Pz.IV, out past the school grounds, down the street until we pull all the way back to find the whole city is on a gigantic aircraft carrier!
• Memories has "Cannon Fodder", which is drawn and edited together to look like one long take.
• Negima!? (second season): In episode 14, all the class 3-A students form a Pactio with Negi while free falling. All animated as a single continuous shot.
• The Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt episode "Nothing to Room" is a fixed shot with the two ladies on a couch.
• One of the most memorable segments from the first season of Pop Team Epic, involves AC-bu (AC部), the team behind the "Bob Epic Team" segments, telling the origin of Hellshake Yano using drawings from numerous sketchbooks. The following season, an entire episode is devoted to them telling a sequel story where everything was done using only sketchbooks. Break-off points were only limited to one take for the opening credits, one take for the main segment, and two separate takes for the ending credits connected with careful editing to make the episode capable in doing continuous loops when rewatching the episode.
• Seitokai Yakuindomo:
  • Played for Laughs in the opening scene of the second season which zooms through the sky, a plane, and a cityscape, before finally focusing on the face Suzu's pet dog Boa.
    Tsuda: We're starting with a dog!?
  • The movie did this again, with the camera following a drone that Hata had stolen from the Robot Research Club as it flies past most of the cast in the hallways, once again stopping with Suzu's dog.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross has an impressive one early in the series, where the arm of Hikaru's Valkryie is shot off in midair while carrying Minnmay. Hikaru manages to catch up to the falling arm, open the canopy, grab Minnmay and pull her into the cockpit, and bring it all safely to a landing.

Comic Books

• Done In-Universe in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, where a producer for a television network that's interviewing Adrian intends to frame it as "a continuous shot, no cuts, no edits, like Orson Welles".
• Issue #87 of Nightwing (Infinite Frontier) is drawn like this, depicting Dick Grayson trying to make it to his home after getting a hit placed on him, only to suit up and chase down some hitmen who took his dog, Haley.
• One of the Greyshirt tales in Tomorrow Stories is told entirely from the unbroken POV of an unlicensed cab driver who accidentally hits Greyshirt — and is hijacked by a gangster who wants him to finish the job.

Films — Animation

• A Christmas Carol (2009):
  • The five-minute title scene starts with one conversation with Scrooge, flies all around London and then back down to the other side of the city, and finishes with him approaching his house.
  • The entire Ghost of Christmas Past scene simply fades from time period to time period without any cuts.
• In The Polar Express, the scene where Hero Boy loses a ticket is a oner as we follow the ticket's journey as it blows around in the wind as it returns to the inside of the train.
• A scene near the beginning of Beowulf (2007) goes from inside a mead hall to above it, where a rat is caught by a bird and flown far away, to Grendel's lair.
• 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.
• Fantasia:
  • The final shot, during the "Ave Maria". A very complicated shot to film, comprising one of the biggest multiplane set ups ever devised, finished only hours before the movie's premiere. According to one article, the shot had to be done three times. The first time it was discovered that the entire shot had been filmed with the wrong lens on the camera, producing impromptu time lapse footage of the animators working around the edge of the frame. The second time there was an earthquake during shooting, which shook the planes out of alignment. The shot was eventually completed so close to the wire that the first print of it had to be spliced into the reel in the projection room of the premiere theater.
  • The Astronomic Zoom that opens the "Rite of Spring" segment, although it consists of separate elements combined through cross-dissolves.
• The simulated Epic Tracking Shot that opens The Rescuers Down Under, done using the then-new CAPS program that replaced the traditional multiplane camera.
• In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney), the song "Out There" ends with a long pan out on Quasimodo standing atop the cathedral, which then pans down to the Paris streets.
• The whole Bagghar chase scene in The Adventures of Tintin (2011) is a Oner, in which Tintin, his dog Snowy, and Captain Haddock are on a motorcycle chasing down a bird holding the three scrolls leading to Sir Francis Haddock's sunken treasure. They race through (as well as lay waste to) the entire town, and the camera shifts from person to person as they all get separated. The camera never cuts once, and it lasts for approximately two and a half minutes.
• Used for a roughly two minute long scene in Penguins of Madagascar where the penguins fall out of the cargo hold of one airplane, slam into another airplane, actually board another plane and mess around on it a little before deciding to leave it, then barely miss getting on yet another plane, and finally fall to the ground, with the shot ending just before they actually land.
• In Ice Age: Collision Course, Buck is introduced by retrieving a stolen egg from a family of dromaeosaurs. His first appearance on screen, the chase to retrieve the egg and giving the egg back to its mother all take place in one singular shot.
• Pinocchio has a spectacular multiplane scene where the camera journeys through the village at morning, starting from the top of a church's bell tower and ending at Gepetto's shop. A shorter one also appears during the "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee" number, an overhead shot of Honest John and Gideon leading Pinocchio down the street.
• Used several times in the Urusei Yatsura movie Beautiful Dreamer, with quite a few shots lasting longer than a minute, including a lengthy sequence of the gang fighting over food at the dinner table, and a Round Table Shot of Onsen-Mark discussing his feelings of déjà-vu with Sakura as he begins to realise everyone is trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• The Wolf House is shot to look like the camera is continuously moving through the house in real time.
• The Bad Guys (2022) opens as an homage to Pulp Fiction with Mr. Wolf and Mr. Snake talking to each other before they rob a bank. This is done as one continuous shot with no cuts lasting two minutes, 25 seconds and seven frames. The longest one-shot in Dreamworks Animation history.
• The Memories segment "Cannon Fodder" is animated to seem like a continuous shot, though there's one cheated transition from a poster depicting the fat officer to the man himself striking the same pose. It's a roughly 22-minute-long short about the daily lives of people living in a city of cannons that is forever at war with an enemy that they don't even know anything about.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie: After Mario and Luigi's car breaks down, there is a long, uninterrupted shot of the bros running through Brooklyn to get to their customer, meant to emulate the look of World 1-1 from the first game. It lasts upwards of 20 seconds.
• Migration: During their first foray into the city, the camera tracks behind the flock (Mostly Mack when they're split up) as they try to swerve around every obstacle, including briefly freefalling from a building.

Films — Live-Action

Entire feature films

• Hardcore Henry is filmed entirely in the protagonist's P.O.V. Cam, and while the film does have visual robotic glitches that act as cuts in a film, the great majority of the films' action setpieces are oners. Just as the Tagline says, doesn't stop for a single breath.
  Tagline: WITNESS THE FIRST-PERSON EXPERIENCE THAT NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER STOPS.
• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), bar the opening and ending, appears as entirely one take, with scene transitions involving people walking down hallways or, in a couple of cases, being a timelapse of a building. Due to the style of shooting, the actors would have to remember up to 15 pages of dialogue at a time while hitting precisely timed choreography marks. Some CGI trickery is used.
• The 2005 independent movie The Circle, starring Angela Bettis, was filmed entirely in a single take. Especially impressive, given there were a few different locations, a flashback sequence, and two of the actors moved from one location to another in a car.
• The 2016 Quebec drama film King Dave by Daniel Grou was filmed all in one take on location, including dream/memory sequences and a transition by real metro train from one station to another.
• The 2021 action thriller film One Shot is done in one take.
• 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 2019 war film 1917 is largely shot and edited to look like it was filmed in a single take, with cuts happening during moments of darkness or as the heroes pass through a doorway. The crew and actors spent six months rehearsing for their scenes, which required enormous sets (such as trenches, towns, and fields) to be hyper-specifically measured and built to accommodate the flow of the script.
• The 2010 Uruguayan horror film The Silent House and along with its 2012 American remake are presented in one continuous shot in 80-minute long take.
• The 2000 film Timecode 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 split screen. The sixteenth take was used. Actors (whose dialogue was largely improvised) move from camera to another, but the cameras never capture each other by accident. The story — multiple plot threads about characters in a Los Angeles film production company.
• The 2018 Norwegian film Utøya: July 22 Based on a True Story about the Breivik Massacre in Norway, 2011, has the entire film being shot like this. The idea being to show in real-time how the shooting played out for some of its victims and how long it lasted, The Oner lasting for 72 minutes, just as long as the Real Life shooting did.
• The 2015 film Victoria consists of a single take spanning 134 minutes, 22 locations, a bank robbery, car chases, a kidnapping, sunrise, and three character deaths. It reportedly required a digital handycam, three months' practice and three live runs to complete.
• Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes: The whole film is shot to appear as one take, though there are hidden cuts throughout.
• Boiling Point (2021) is presented in a single, unbroken take^note The director chose to use the third out of four completed run throughs. to show what happens over the course of a single night at a fine-dining restaurant. It is the expansion of a short film, also titled Boiling Point, that was also shot in a single take.

Directors who do this a lot

• Kenneth Branagh's doesn't appear to like oners, he ADORES them.
  • His 1996 movie version of Hamlet features several entire scenes, including ones that span several rooms, shot in a single take as well as most of the soliloquies.
  • He used it in his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (1993) as well. Roughly the last eight minutes is one continuous shot.
  • His adaptation of Henry V features the aftermath of the Battle of Agincourt with the soldiers picking up their wounded and dead, while singing "Non Nobis" all in one take.
  • Dead Again has a technically challenging continuous circular shot around a table featuring Derek Jacobi hypnotizing Emma Thompson with Branagh himself as witness, and they all deliver their very best in performance and timing.
  • Murder on the Orient Express (2017) features three different instances:
    • A nice one where Bouc negotiates with the porter to get Poirot a berth on the Orient Express, and then Poirot boards the train and meets some of the passengers while on his way to his berth, just over two minutes long and masterfully paced, with a good chunk of the scene filmed outside of the train with the camera following Poirot through the train windows.
    • The scene where Ratchet's body is discovered is a continuous two-minute take with the camera shooting entirely overhead.
    • Poirot leaving his berth and walking down the hallway to leave the train while mentally weighing the events of the case is also shot in one take of around 90 seconds.
• Alfonso Cuarón is known for making long continuous takes part of his directing style:
  • There's a couple of sequences in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that use this:
    • A panning shot starting outside Hogwarts and going inside to see our heroes around three-quarters of the way in.
    • The Time-Turner scene. Hermione puts the Time-Turner around hers and Harry's necks. They go back in time and turn around to run out of the clock tower. The camera goes out through the clock and catches up with them in the courtyard. This all happens in one take which lasts for slightly longer than one minute.
    • Chris Columbus was impressed by these because the length of the shots in the first film were literally how long the kids could stay in character. The kids improved a bit by the second film, so the shots are somewhat longer than on the first, but not by too much. So naturally Columbus found it impressive that they had come far enough to do an entire scene in one take by the third movie.
  • 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 blue screen effects, and some were stitched together cleverly from short takes. 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.
  • Y tu mamá también:
    • A Oner happens during the scene where the boys are driving the car.
    • While less impressive from a technical point of view (there's no tracking), the scene where the boys are hitting on Luisa while watching the mariachis.
    • Tenoche's sex scenes with his girlfriend (about 2 minutes) and Luisa (about 4 minutes).
  • The kiss under the rain in Great Expectations.
  • His sequence in Paris, je t'aime, called "Parc Monceau." The whole short film was one continuous shot.
  • Gravity. There is only one cut in approximately the first thirty minutes. The remainder of the camera work is accomplished through continuous panning. The cinematography is done by the highly acclaimed cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, a frequent collaborator of Cuaron, who also did the cinematography for Y Tu Mama Tambien, Great Expectations and Children Of Men, all which are mentioned above, so this isn't surprising.
• Films by Jim Cummings (Filmmaker) took this form after the success of his single-shot short Thunder Road. Its adaptation to a feature is basically composed of these, and he even got a deal with Fullscreen to produce 6 one-shot shorts throughout 2017.
• Brian De Palma:
  • Phantom of the Paradise features a Split Screen version of this for the scene where the Phantom attempts to use a bomb hidden in a car that's to driven on stage for a performance to kill The Beach Bums.
  • Carrie (1976) features an extended tracking shot during the prom scene as the camera starts at Carrie and Tommy's table as they hand in their ballots, follows the ballots as they are switched for a fake stack to be handed to the teachers for counting, pans up to the bucket of pig's blood over the stage and the rope being held by Chris and Billy, and finally zooms in on Carrie and Tommy's table as they are declared prom king and queen.
  • Snake Eyes: The opening scene follows Nicolas Cage's character as he enters and walks through the casino to the boxing ring. Also, when Cage's character questions various suspects and witnesses to the murder about what they were doing, their flashbacks are shown via a continuous point of view shot while they narrate over it.
  • The Untouchables (1987) includes a oner before Wallace and George get killed,
  • Redacted: is used in found footage.
  • Casualties of War has two oners similar to The Untouchables (1987) that creates suspense and is seen through the eyes of an evildoer: when the soldiers are about to kidnap Oanh and when Clark tries to kill Eriksson.
  • Carlito's Way uses one towards the end of the film, when Al Pacino's character enters Grand Central Station in an attempt to escape from his pursuers.
  • There a few in Blow Out, such as the Slasher Movie sequence and the scene in Jack's studio where he realizes his tapes have been erased.
• Peter Greenaway loves doing this in general by either keeping the camera still and shooting one long take or following the characters through various sets.
  • The intro to Prospero's Books has the title character reciting Shakespeare while the background comes alive behind him with characters appearing out of the shadows, including a small boy urinating in the pool. There are actually several long panning shots that follow characters through multiple sets while giving monologues.
  • He did this throughout the entire film of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
• Alfred Hitchcock:
  • Rope was made "continuous" by closeups of a back or whatnot to allow changing reels. (Known as a Body Wipe) 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 unmasked cuts were due to necessity as projector reels could only hold 20 minutes of film at the time.
  • Rear Window sometimes shows occurrences in the apartments through unbroken pans past different tenants' windows.
  • Shows up a few times very effectively in Frenzy:
    • A woman enters a building where someone has just been murdered. We spend a good while just waiting outside, until we hear her scream as she discovers the body.
    • The killer invites another victim into his apartment, followed by the camera retreating down the stairs as if afraid of what's going to happen, and ends up on the street as numerous people walk by, oblivious to what's happening in the building.
    • The protagonist's sentencing after he's framed for the murders is filmed from outside the courtroom, as the soundproof doors only let us hear pieces of what the judge is saying as people walk in and out. They shut just before he states the sentence, but the furious shouting afterwards makes it clear what it was.
• James Rolfe
  • The Night Prowler is made to look like it's filmed entirely in a single take, though the cuts are poorly disguised with whip pans.
  • Kill For Thrill is (for the most part) entirely in one take as a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.
• M. Night Shyamalan does them a lot.
  • Unbreakable: Most scenes are shot entirely in one take.
  • The Last Airbender includes several, including: the whole earth bending battle, Aang and the Blue Spirit's escape of the Fire Nation camp, and the finale as Aang fights his way through a Fire Nation army in the Water Tribe's settlement. Note that Tropes Are Not Good: the Earth Kingdom fight, though technically impressive, also yielded a Fight Scene Failure due to strange tracking choices (see also: the Pebble Dance) and the sight of stuntmen standing around waiting for their moment in the fight — a thing which most directors hide by the simple expedient of not filming it.
  • In The Happening, the camera follows a gun as one person after another picks it up and kills themselves.
• One of Steven Spielberg's trademarks is to take a relatively simple scene that would normally created by editing together a master shot and various coverage shots by shooting it in a single take (for example, Marion Ravenwood's introduction in Raiders of the Lost Ark) and doing it in a way that the audience doesn't even realize that they just watched an extended sequence. Some people refer to this technique as the "Spielberg Oner".
• Quentin Tarantino examples:
  • The final, Tarantino-directed segment of Four Rooms.
  • Pulp Fiction:
    • The scene with Jules and Vincent in the apartment building hallway at the beginning is one shot. A shorter one follows Vince into and through Jackrabbit Slim's.
    • The sequence when Butch goes from his car down an alley, through a hole in a fence, and across an empty lot to get to his apartment.
  • Jackie Brown:
    • The opening credits with Jackie on a moving sidewalk were a single shot.
    • The scene where she wanders through the mall working herself up into being panicked, and waiting an appropriate about of time before yelling for Ray in order for her scheme to work.
  • 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.
  • Kill Bill Vol. 2 captures The Bride's walk down the aisle, the reveal of the Vipers outside of the chapel and the ensuing massacre in a single 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 Death Proof, a conversation in a coffee shop around half-way through.
• Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the all time masters in long takes, and his films such as Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, and Stalker make masterful uses of the long take, with fantastic camerawork and framing. Nostalghia includes a nine-minute single take of a man carrying a candle across a drained pool.
• This was a trademark of Orson Welles' work:
  • There are two long takes in Citizen Kane. It was the first time it had ever been done for narrative purposes rather than technical limitations. At the time, no one had ever thought to do it. As a newbie to film making, Welles didn't know that, and impressed everyone by pulling it off.
  • There's a four-minute continuous take in The Stranger that starts in the middle of the road and then follows the actors through the forest.
  • Touch of Evil
    • The opening sequence features one of the most famous continuous camera shots. It's also an impressively long Tracking Shot.
    • Also, the scene which takes place at the Sanchez residence where Menzies discovers two sticks of dynamite in a shoebox Vargas had just moments before seen to be empty. This was the first scene filmed. When Welles shot it in one continuous take, it put the film ahead of schedule which helped to placate studio execs nervous about having the meticulous director at the helm.
  • The remnants of one can still be seen in The Magnificent Ambersons during the ball scene where the camera originally tracked two characters walking up three floors on a staircase. Welles considered the shot the greatest technical achievement of the film, but Executive Meddling saw it (like the rest of the film) severely cut, with the single-shot aspect consequently lost.
  • The scene in The Trial where the police show up in Josef's apartment early in the morning, without any warning, and start interrogating him begins as a four-minute continuous take.
• The trademark of the late great Hungarian filmmaker, Miklós Jancsó.
  • Jancsó's films consisted of very long (often ten-twelve minutes), very complicated and carefully choreographed shots, featuring large crowds of people, including dancers, musicians, horse-riders, soldiers, etc.
• Also the trademark of another acclaimed Hungarian filmmaker, Béla Tarr.
  • Tarr started this in his 1982 student film adaptation of Macbeth, filmed on video. The entire film consists of two shots: one running for five minutes, the other for a full 57 minutes.
  • It became his real trademark starting with 1988's Damnation, and continuing with the seven-hour masterpiece, Satantango in 1994, Werckmeister Harmonies in 2000, The Man From London in 2007, and his final film (at least at the moment), The Turin Horse in 2011.
  • Tarr uses long shots (often around five-ten minutes) with very slow pacing, depicting the dullness and emptiness of life in its entirety, such as characters sitting around drinking, walking through dirty roads, dancing around drunk, etc.
• Gus Van Sant frequently uses long takes (in which he was greatly inspired by Tarr).
  • In Elephant (2003), for example, shots often show characters simply walking for several minutes of screen time, sometimes without the camera even following them (that is, they walk away and the camera remains stationary, with them shrinking into the scene's background).
  • He also used it in his earlier Gerry, a lot. One of particular note is an extended shot of the two main characters walking through the desert, the camera in extreme close-up, with only the crunch of the rocks beneath their feet on the soundtrack.
  • Another was a seven minute shot of the two of them walking away from the camera (as it followed them) as the sun rose.
  • There's a particularly painful one in Last Days, a long shot featuring the camera on a dolly moving slowly backwards from a window. It was complicated by a) they only had two pieces of dolly track for a movement about five times that distance b) the ground was visible in the shot and c) they were shooting live sound. An extra on the DVD shows a bunch of art dogs trying their damndest to remove the track and then reassemble it behind the dolly while crouching beneath the shot and not making a sound. It took upwards of a dozen tries before they got it.
• Steve McQueen does this quite often in his work.
  • His directorial debut, Hunger, features an uninterrupted shot of two characters sitting at a table talking that lasts 17 and a half minutes.
  • His Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave uses several to disturbing effect, such as a shot where Northup has to stand on his tiptoes with a noose around his neck that lasts over 80 seconds.

Other examples

• 12 Angry Men has two—one towards the beginning, in which each of the jurors establishes himself as the camera pans around the room and focuses briefly on several different conversations; and one when Henry Fonda goes to wash his hands and other characters duck into the bathroom to chat with him.
• In the film of the musical 1776, the opening scene of Adams descending the staircase from the bell tower, entering the Continental Congress, and delivering his opening monologue before the first song is all one take. The filmmakers note in the DVD commentary how difficult it was building a camera rig that would give a smooth transition from descending from the ceiling into the Congress chamber. There's a noticeable bump as the camera is wheeled off the extending platform used to film the stairs part of the shot.
• The camera in 2:37 often follows a character through the school for extended periods of time, sometimes switching which character it follows mid-shot.
• Aladdin (2019)'s opening has the camera pan from the narrator's boat into Agrabah and the Cave of Wonders, introducing every character in the movie.
• All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930 version has a rather long shot of French soldiers getting mowed down.
• All the President's Men has a six minute long shot of Redford talking on the phone with three different people, in a total of four phone calls, trying to track down Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Not only is there the challenge of making a phone call interesting to watch, there's also a ton of dialogue featuring some heavy exposition and the extras are making a lot of noise in the background. At one point Redford calls one of the people he's talking to by the wrong name, but keeps character and just goes with it.
• Antebellum opens with a sweeping tracking shot that begins by coming across the lawns to the idyllic facade of the plantation manor house. The shot continues—growing darker both in lighting and subject matter—sweeping past the house and through the Confederate troops and house slaves, to the back the property where the field slaves labour; finishing with Captain Jasper swigging from his hip flask as he prepares to ride down a runaway slave.
• The 2018 wuxia Assassins of Brotherhood has a tavern fight filmed in this manner, when the hero marches into a seemingly-empty tavern... only for two dozen mooks to burst out and attack, where the camera then follows the hero killing enemies one at a time, leaping to the tavern's second floor, facing more mooks in a corridor which he kills, before leaping to the ground floor, all in one take. There might be a few "cheat" angles as the camera gets momentarily blocked by the hero's body or by a pillar, but it's disguised well enough to avoid giving away any cuts.
• 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.
• Back to the Future:
  • The scene in Back to the Future Part II where the whole McFly family (including three characters played by Michael J. Fox) eats dinner was filmed as a oner to showcase the new technology that made it possible for three Michael J. Foxes to appear at once. When someone pointed out that you wouldn't film the scene that way under ordinary circumstances, Zemeckis decided to break it up.
  • Back to the Future begins with a pan through Doc Brown's laboratory that goes at least two minutes without a cut.
• The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: When arresting a suspect who's holed up in his house, McDonaugh orders his unit to keep their guns trained on the front door. Then the camera follows him as he circles around through the neighbor's adjacent house, enters through the back door, puts his gun right against the back of the suspect's head, and marches him out through the front door.
• being Hands is filmed continuously, without cuts or splices.
• Be Kind Rewind has a nice oner where we see a bunch of films getting edited simultaneously.
• 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.
• The Big Lebowski uses these, both running exactly two and a half minutes, in the two on-screen appearances of the narrating Stranger:
  • In his first scene, after The Dude has been paid a visit by the nihilists "threatening castration", he, Walter, and Donny discuss the events at the bowling alley's bar before an argument has the latter two opting to go bowl. The camera closes in on The Dude getting another drink before pulling back and revealing the Stranger in the spot where Walter and Donny previously occupied.
  • In the final scene of the movie, The Dude encounters The Stranger again and "abides", leaving The Stranger to monologue the movie to a close, finishing with an emphasized shot of a bowler in the background throwing an apparent strike with a Smash to Black.
• Black Snake Moan: Rae grabs young Lincoln in a passionate embrace; we're outside as she slams the front door. The camera slowly pulls back, rises in the air (a crane shot), and stays there for about 45 seconds. It's not long as oners go, but there's a lot of tension as Lazarus, who'd been buying gifts for Rae, slowly drives into the yard, gets out, and enters the house.
• 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.
• Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory has a long shot, one of the first ever shots done with a Steadicam, following Woody Guthrie as he goes through a Depression-era shantytown.
• Charlie's Angels (2000) opens with one, which is actually three shots stitched together via hidden cuts. The shot goes from the Columbia logo to a plane in flight, through the window, down the aisle and back and ends when LL Cool J (actually Dylan in disguise) grabs a hijacker and pulls him out the door.
• City Hunter: The Cupid's Perfume: The P.O.V. Cam scene, including Ryo's interrogation by the bad guys, then him managing to free himself and fight the henchmen, is at first a fairly long unique shot — for an extremely complex scene involving lots of fighting, special effects (the revolvers being caught by the scrapyard electromagnet) and concluding with a car crash. There is one cut to Kaori, before returning to the P.O.V. Cam again to finish the fight.
• A Clockwork Orange:
  • The scene in which Alex's head is forced into an (obviously full) water trough while he is brutally beaten is filmed in one tank to maximize the effect of Alex never being allowed to come up for air. Instead, the filmmakers put a breathing apparatus under the water, but it failed to work properly and McDowell did, indeed, nearly drown.
  • The film's opening shot is one of the most iconic oners in film history, showing Alex giving a menacing, unblinking Kubrick Stare to the viewer as the camera slowly pans out and he gives a voiceover monologue.
• Cloverfield has a lot of these, due to its premise of the camera being operated by one of the main characters.
• All segments of Haneke's Code Unknown are shot as long single takes, with the first one lasting over seven minutes.
• Crazy Samurai Musashi has a 77-minute long action sequence in which the title character kills 400 different opponents, all done in one take.
• Creed has a four-minute real boxing match between Adonis and Leo Sporino, spanning match introductions, two rounds, and the final victory, in order to make the fight feel more relentless and stress how it feels to be in the ring. The camera tracks both boxers and the referee, getting within feet of the actual punches being thrown. When fighters bob and slip, they disappear from the frame completely. Stereo audio is also implemented, where character voices come from the speaker or location that mimics their position relative to the sole camera. A stationary character, such as Rocky staying within Creed's corner, sound as if they're coming from left or right, in front or behind, relative to where the camera is pointing. Depth also comes into play, with characters fading out the farther they are from the filming. The audience's noise comes from all over, as well, but are quieter when the camera gets close to the fighters, to show how locked in they are to the fight.
• In the forgotten comedy The Crew, the movie has a rather clever homage to the Goodfellas oner; the film's four lead aging gangsters try to get in to a crowded diner for an early-bird special, and are led through the back of the kitchen for a good minute, Scorcese-style. Only instead of being led to a table, the manager leads them to the back alley exit and shuts the door behind them.
• Cry_Wolf has a rather impressive Oner with an extremely steady cameraman —- no dolly used, even. It goes over all sorts of rough terrain.
• Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls had one in the scene where Monty and Julia arrive back at her house after a night out on the town.
• Special case: Dancer in the Dark shoots all its Musical numbers as one continuous Long Take using up to 100 stationary cameras in Technicolor, then cuts between all the footage generated. The rest of the movie is filmed with blurry handheld cameras in the style of Dogme '95, to show how the protagonist is going blind and the musical numbers are what she sees in her head. The result is fascinating because you can tell all the footage of singing dancing was taken from multiple odd angles of one single take (under a desk, atop a railway car, etc.).
• The Dark Knight, The Joker, a hospital, and a lot of bombs, some of them even going off.
• The opening shot of The Day After Tomorrow is the longest CGI generated one-shot, it runs for just over two minutes.
• The film Death Sentence has one which follows Kevin Bacon's character chasing a mook through several floors of a parking complex. As it was a handheld camera that covered a lot of distance both horizontally and vertically, it was literally handed off from one cameraman to another through the duration of the sequence.
• The Hindi film Dil Dhadakne Do has the song Gallan Goodiyaan, with a large cast singing and dancing, and was shot not just in one shot, but also in one take.
• An early one is this sequence from Charlie Chaplin's A Dog's Life.
• The film version of Doom, has a single continuous sequence seen from the first person, that due to filming requirements had to be done in this manner, with the actors for the monsters stacking up into a long line behind the camera, and staying outside of the shot the entire time. It took three weeks to make!
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) 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.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Doric’s shape-shifting escape from Sofina and the palace guards is edited into one shot.
• Elena Undone: The entire scene in which Elena first kisses Peyton, leading to an intense makeout session, is a oner clocking in at 3 minutes and 51 seconds.
• Fight Club has a scene which appears to show Tyler in two places at once, achieved by Brad Pitt running around the back of the camera very quickly as it pans round.
• The long Steadicam shot in The Formula, including the men walking down flights of stairs while talking.
• A Free Soul has a 14-minute continuous take courtroom scene. This was done by using two cameras and splicing the footage together.
• Funny Games featured several of these throughout the film, including a 10-minute take of Anna and Georg cutting through their bonds and moving into the kitchen after the killers murder their son and seemingly leave them alone in their own house.
• Furious 7 opens with a long take of Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) giving a monologue to his brother in a hospital, then casually walking out of said hospital, revealing that it had been almost completely destroyed in a firefight between him and a SWAT team.
• The Game Changer opens with a minute-long uninterrupted shot of 1940s Shanghai, sweeping through the city's waterfront, the streets, rows and rows of cars, before finally having the camera going inside the limo where the female protagonist is seated.
• Game Night has the sequence where the protagonists are attempting to steal the Faberge Egg from Donald Anderton's house, constantly tossing it to each other in order to stay ahead of the security guards chasing them.
• Gangster Squad does this in the scene where Jerry Wooters goes to a nightclub of Cohen's to meet with Jack Whalen. It starts outside the nightclub, follows Jerry as he passes and pays off Pete the shoeshine boy, enters the club, hands his hat to one of the cigarette girls, then makes his way into the club, and eventually sits down with Whalen.
• Ghost (1990) does this with its opening credits, an unbroken two-minute tour through the attic of Sam and Molly's new home.
• Ghostbusters has one in Louis's apartment during his party. The entire shot was also ad libbed by Rick Moranis.
• Goodfellas: The famous scene where Henry Hill takes his girlfriend to the nightclub, past the line at the door, in through the kitchen and out into the club where veteran comedian Henny Youngman peforms. It's made more impressive because the extras outside the club had to run inside to serve double-duty as the night club audience. Youngman proved to be the biggest liability, as he kept flubbing his lines at the very end.
• In Good Will Hunting Robin Williams's famous monologue on the park bench is shot for roughly the first two thirds of it in a single take that lasts over three and a half minutes. The camera shot is a closeup of Williams's face as it very slowly pans around him. Notably this breaks one of the standard rules of filmmaking as he does ask brief questions from Matt Damon's character Will during it and he responds, but the camera does not cut to the other speaker.
• Gun Crazy used a oner during a bank holdup filmed from the inside of the getaway car. The entire scene takes three-and-a-half minutes.
• The opening scene in the original Halloween.
• Michael's return to Haddonfield in Halloween (2018), in which he wanders through a block of houses and stabbing the inhabitants, is done as a one-take, albeit with some disguising edits.
• Hanna has several long takes, including a 3-minute one happening in a busy bus station and ending in an underground tunnel brawl.
• 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."
• The final action scene of Hellboy is shot in one continuous take.
• Both Henry V films: 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 battle. Both versions record Mistress Quickly's monologue in one take, with Branagh directly referencing Olivier's version.
• Except for maybe the Flying Elvises, Honeymoon In Vegas is a thoroughly forgettable movie that happens to contain one of the best put-together long takes ever seen. It's August in Vegas, and two old-school wiseguys (James Caan and Johnny Williams) arrive for a little R&R. They're shown in a dolly shot walking poolside upon their arrival, walking, walking, weaving around cabana chairs and splashing children, walking, walking, for about 30 seconds ... suddenly Caan stops and turns to Williams:
  Goddamn it's hot.
• The scene in The Hunt for Red October where the officers eat dinner is done as one take with the camera panning to follow the conversation like someone sitting at the table turning his head.
• Propaganda pic I Am Cuba has some incredibly long takes in which the camera floats around throughout the scene. In one sequence, it goes around a high-class pool party and even ducks under the water for a while before emerging again. In another, it follows the coffin of a dead student through crowded streets, up the sides of a building, through the top floor, and then out again along a balcony. These were often done by having the camera passed along a "bucket line" of cameramen!
• In Bruges homages Touch of Evil with a scene of Brendan Gleeson's character watching the appropriate scene from the film and then having a long phone conversation with Ralph Fiennes' character within a single shot.
• In the Heights plays out Usnavi's and Vanessa's exchanges in "Blackout" and "Champagne" uninterrupted, complete with the actors singing on set.
• Irréversible consists entirely of Oners shown in reverse order. One contains a murder, another a rape.
• It Follows:
  • The very first shot after the opening titles starts with a pan across the street to Annie's house and ends with Annie driving off.
  • A slow pan around a school corridor occurs when Jay and Greg try to track down Jeff/Hugh and you can see (though the camera shows it no favour) "It" walking off of the campus pavement toward the door of the hallway bearing the school records room in which Jay and her friends are doing research.
  • Jay running from the beachhouse, getting in the car, driving off of the road, and having an accident all takes place during a single shot.
• James Bond:
  • 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.
  • Several in Skyfall:
    • The fight sequence between Bond and Patrice in Shanghai.
    • Bond and Eve surveying the casino in Macau.
    • Raoul Silva's introduction, where he steps out from an elevator at the end of a long hallway and slowly walks towards Bond, all while giving a long (yet intriguing) monologue. The director had the hallway constructed to accommodate the length of the speech.
  • Two in Spectre:
    • The one opening the movie following Bond's movements from the Day of the Dead procession as he stalks Sciarra, into the elevator of the hotel, into the room that he's sharing with the Bond Girl du jour, then out onto the rooftop. It is not actually a single take but four (for one thing, the last shot was filmed at Pinewood Studio in the UK) and you can see the joins if you know what to look for.
    • Lucia Sciarra entering her apartment and walking to her outdoors fountain.
  • No Time to Die has the stairwell action sequence — an apparently unbroken shot of Bond fighting his way up a staircase, exchanging bullets and punches with numerous heavily armed goons, avoiding grenades, and at one point going into Shell-Shock Silence.
• JCVD features a couple, opening with an extended parody of star Jean-Claude Van Damme's previous movies, with Van Damme roaming around an urban battlescape deploying every kind of weapon up to and including the kitchen sink. Later he floats up to ceiling (at least in his own mind) and engages in a heartfelt and extended soliloquy.
• Jurassic World: In the climatic battle, the moment Blue enters the fight till the I. Rex is defeated is one shot. You see Blue attacking the Indominus, then Rexy rejoining the fight, the protaganists trying to flee the scene and again the fight.
• Kamen Rider ZO: The beginning of the last fight against Doras is a single take that last for 1 minute and 40 seconds. The camera isn't mounted, and they fight around a central pillar - at one point, the camera operator is lifted up onto a walkway 3 meters up and lowered again as the fight continues below him.
• The church battle in Kingsman: The Secret Service is designed to look like one, though there actually are several cuts hidden with whip pans (plus the inserts of the people watching). In an interview, Colin Firth claimed that the sequence was so carefully rehearsed and choreographed that they could have done it on stage in front of a live audience.
• Kingsman: The Golden Circle has its final battle apparently filmed in a single take. It was actually a very complex, heavily digitally enhanced shot on a green screen set with switches between the actors and stunt doubles.
• A Knight's Tale has one that the director freely admitted was for a purely practical reason: he really wanted to film one scene in a certain cathedral and could only get permission to film there for one night. Since setting up individual shots always takes up a lot of extra time; he managed to film quickly by reducing the scene to three: a lengthy distance shot during which most of the scene takes place, and two brief close-ups for a dramatic exchange of final words at the end.
• Knowing: The airplane crash sequence is one continuous shot that's over two minutes long.
• Busby Berkeley supplied a famous example in Lady Be Good. Two-thirds of Eleanor Powell's dance to "Fascinating Rhythm" is a single shot.
• Many of the shots in La La Land are over thirty seconds long. The opening musical number is actually three shots, but edited with whip pans to make it seem like one continuous shot that lasts for six minutes. Also, Mia's final audition consists of one shot of a zoom into her face, a pan around her, and a zoom out, which last three minutes.
• The opening number of the film version of The Last Five Years is actually five shots: a crane in through a window on Cathy's face; a cut to the reverse shot of the letter Jame wrote her to say goodbye; several expositional shots of the Official Couple's photographs, showing the detritus of their now-sundered marriage; and back to Cathy. Only the transition between the first two shots is a clear edit; everything else is seamless.
• 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 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 Final Battle in London Has Fallen starts out with one of these, similar to a scene from Hard Boiled. And it's awesome.
• The Longest Day has a long take showing French commandos storming a German strongpoint at Ouistreham. Although shorter than many other entries on this list (about ninety seconds), it still contains hundreds of extras coming in from multiple directions, over several city blocks, and lots of pyrotechnics, all of which had to be carefully choreographed. And it was filmed from a helicopter.
• In The Long Good Friday, the final shot holds on Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) as he's driven away, replaying the events of the last few days in his head. We see him run the gamut of emotions as everything becomes clear to him.
• The 2015 film adaptation of Macbeth has the "out, damned spot" soliloquy played out in two shots: first a quick establishing shot that shows Lady Macbeth sitting on the floor alone, then it cuts to a close-up of her face for almost 3 minutes (the longest take in the entire film) and only cuts once the soliloquy is over. Then we see that Lady Macbeth has been talking to a hallucination of her dead child.
• Almost all of 19-minute short film Madre is a single take of a woman pacing around her apartment while on the phone.
• Judy Garland's performance of "The Man That Got Away" in the 1954 version of A Star Is Born was shot in one take. The camera doesn't move to much, but wow, does it show off the performance.
• 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.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Avengers:
    • The climactic battle, following each member of the team as they whoop the Chitauri's collective ass to hell and back. We start with Black Widow riding a hijacked Chitauri craft... to Iron Man covering her back by blasting chasing craft... to Iron Man landing next to Captain America and reflecting his beam off of Cap's shield to clear out enemies... to Hawkeye picking off Chitauri from nearby to afar... to Thor and the Hulk fighting on top of a Leviathan and ultimately using a concerted effort to bring the monster down. The scene can be viewed here.
    • There's a less epic one earlier, when the team is arguing aboard the Helicarrier.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron:
    • The sequel starts with one, with the team fighting their way through the woods of Sokovia, assaulting a base of HYDRA.
    • The scene of the Iron Man drones getting back to the Stark tower is also a long take, with the "camera" going through a glass ceiling to follow the Avengers.
    • During the climactic final battle, we get one long beautiful rotating shot of all the Avengers taking down Ultron's drones.
  • The title sequence for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is a single take of Baby Groot dancing to "Mr. Blue Sky" while the rest of the Guardians fight the Abilisk in the background.
  • Black Panther: During the fight in the Korean illegal casino, one shot starts on the balcony with Okoye fighting Klaue's goons, moves down to the main floor where Nakia, T'Challa and Ross are tussling with their own foes, and then follow Klaue back to the balcony, pursued by T'Challa, with no visible cuts in the action.
  • Avengers: Infinity War has two essentially bookending the movie. The first comes when the Children of Thanos arrive in New York and Tony, Dr. Strange, Banner and Wong navigate a chaotic city street. The second is The Stinger, which features Nick Fury and Maria Hill driving down a street, and shows the immediate consequences of Thanos's snap. Interestingly, they're not very flashy scenes, to the extent that the viewer might not even notice they're long takes until it's pointed out.
  • Avengers: Endgame:
    • Ronin's assault on the Tokyo criminals is shot in a single long take.
    • The scene from the initial clash between the two armies up to the Back-to-Back Badasses moment of Pepper and Tony is a continuous shot, and admittedly the most daunting for the SFX teams.
    • Tony's funeral, starting at the floating wreath and ending at the front door with Fury, passing by every hero in attendance.
• Minority Report had a Oner sequence that was copied/homaged by Kill Bill Vol.1 that involved the camera floating above the ceilings of the apartment building.
• Les Miserables had a couple of songs as one long take, most notably "I Dreamed a Dream" and Éponine's version of "On My Own".
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Overly Long Gag "make sure the prince doesn't leave the room until I come and get him" scene in Swamp Castle is one take.
• Mission: Impossible Film Series:
  • The scene in Mission: Impossible III where Ethan Hunt runs through Shanghai is done in one long 20-second take, with the camera following his path while warning the citizens to move out of the way.
  • The underwater setpiece in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is filmed featuring several individual Oners intersected with cuts to Benji and Ilsa.
  • Mission: Impossible – Fallout has the HALO jump section, which stitched together three takes^note out of over 100 into a seemingly continuous sequence, where we follow Ethan every step of the way, from the initial jump, to him saving Walker, finally cutting when the chutes are deployed.
• Non-Stop: A particularly neat tracking shot following Marks as he "randomly" searches passengers. Obviously edited, since halfway through the camera moves through a window and reenters the plane at another one further down, but that doesn't mean it's not impressive.
• The famous "hallway rampage" sequence of Chanwook Park's Oldboy (2003) pans along a long hallway, following the hero as he fights off an entire gang, armed with a hammer. The scene nears four minutes in length.
• One Cut of the Dead: The film's first act is a single, 30-minute long continuous take of a zombie movie crew getting attacked by zombies, filmed without hidden edits. The film then reveals that this whole sequence was a Show Within a Show. The rest of the film is a flashback to a film crew planning and executing the single-take horror film to be broadcast live on television.
• Outlaw King opens with an eight and a half minute single shot that starts with an extended monologue, follows the characters out into a swordfight, then returns to the tent for a conversation, and finally leaves the tent again for the firing of a trebuchet.
• The opening shot from The Place Beyond the Pines, which follows Luke from his trailer to the globe of death.
• Robert Altman's The Player has an eight-minute single-cut intro. It features two men walking through the scene discussing old movies with single-cut intros. Perhaps even more impressively, all the background characters are people in the movie industry talking about movie-related stuff; so the (real) people in the movie industry who were playing the characters ad-libbed all the background dialog.
• The movie Postcards from the Edge starts with a scene lampshading this practice; a misspoken line threatens to ruin the entire shot.
• In Pride and Prejudice, right after Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy dance at the ball, a montage of the ball starts. It's easy to miss that this is really one long shot. After a bit of dialogue, Keira Knightley had to sprint through the house to pass a doorway before the camera got to it, and then steady her breathing for when the camera got to her in her next position.
• [REC] has a few, seeing how this is done in the style of a pseudo-documentary. A good example is the introductory scene, in which Ángela and the firemen arrive outside, enter the lobby and speak with the tenants, ascend the stairs and talk with the policemen, break the door down and enter the apartment, and meet and get assaulted by the zombified woman.
• The Revenant has an incredibly impressive one in the beginning, depicting a battle between the trappers and Native American Arikara.
• Revenge: The is a single long tracking shot that starts when Richard hears a noise and steps out of the shower and picks up his shotgun. The shot then follows him as he prowls the house and the pool area in search of Jen. The long shot is useful as it establishes the exact layout of the corridors where Richard and Jen will later be playing cat-and-mouse.
• Saving Private Ryan has several, most notably the scene in which the squad enters Neuville, with the halftrack and a shot in the final battle where Mellish, Henderson and Upham move to the second floor of the cafe.
• Scaramouche features the longest continuous sword fight in film history. As it took place in a pre-Revolutionary France theatre, complete with over 600 extras in full costume, they had to get it done in one take. As it was so long the lead actors couldn't be trusted to do it, so the fight director and his assistant did it all in long-shot. After beginning the fight on the edge of the boxes, it moved to the corridor outside, then to the balconied foyer, where a single camera picks up the shot and follows them down the stairs, across the foyer, and back into the auditorium, roughly a third of the fight. The whole fight took over seven minutes, included two near-fatal accidents, and needed nine cameras to film, to cover the boxes, the corridor, the foyer, the auditorium, onstage, and backstage, none of which could be in shot for any other camera. After it was done, the leads did some close-ups of a few short sequences during the fight, and these close-ups cover the cuts between each camera.
• The Secret in Their Eyes has a truly impressive Oner that starts high in the air, shot from a helicopter approaching a soccer stadium where a game is being played, pans over the players and zooms in on the crowd where Esposito and Sandoval are trying to find the suspect which they do right as a goal is converted and the crowd goes mad, causing them to lose him which in turns gives place to a chase scene through the inside of the stadium, up and down several levels of passages and staircases, inside a bathroom and back out, and eventually back out onto the playing field, where the suspect is finally captured. The whole scene lasts over five minutes.
• Serenity introduces the crew by tracking through the ship in a oner. It actually needed two shots because of the configuration of the ship sets; the cut is disguised with a Whip Pan between Mal and Simon when they hit the staircase.
• 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 Apocalypse and one is during. Shaun had just woken up and is equally oblivious in both.
• The opening scene of A Shot in the Dark is four minutes of people sneaking into each other's bedrooms, establishing that everyone in the Ballon household is having an affair with at least one other member of the household.
• Shredder Orpheus's climax has a continuous shot where Orpheus sees an Underworld pillar with the same logo as his skateboard, sees Hades in the distance, then walks along where Hades is right next to him as he passes a pillar, and continues to focus on both men as they confront each other and Hades drags Orpheus away. The director said it was one of the most difficult shots in the movie due to its unbroken length and tricky camerawork involved.
• Unique, if somewhat short, variant: Silent Hill features one shot that starts directly behind the protagonists struggling to hold a door shut, facing a complete wall. It then rises until pointing downwards, over the wall and door, and then lowers until aiming straight-on again behind the men trying to break in. Obviously thrown together with just a bit of cheap bisecting CGI of the wall to cover the wipe, right? Nope; the entire wall was constructed to let the top open up, allow the camera through, and close back up before coming down on the other side.
• In Silver Lode, there is an uninterrupted shot lasting nearly a full minute following Ballard through the town on his way to the telegraph office as he does his best to avoid detection by the townspeople.
• $la$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 Spectacular Now: Aimee and Sutter's first time is shot in one take lasting 3 minutes. Well, 30 seconds of coitus and the rest being buildup.
• Stan & Ollie opens with the titular duo in their dressing room, tracks them as they walk across the busy studio lot, and then follows them onto a movie set where they proceed to film a scene.
• While the sequence is almost entirely CGI, the first shot of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is a Oner, going from the beginning of the opening crawl, then following two starfighters though a battle to nearly three minutes later focusing in on Anakin in his starfighter.
• The German movie Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) is brought in 14 chapters, paralleling the 14 stations of the cross that Jesus encounters in his final days and hours. Each of these 14 scenes is brought in a single take, and all but two chapters (late in the film) are filmed with a fixed camera angle. The longest take is the first scene in a Sunday school class lasting for almost 14 min.
• Stop Making Sense features many long takes, which is unique due to it being a Concert Film. The most famous one comes from Once in a Lifetime, where almost the entire song is shot in one angle, a medium shot of David Byrne singing. The first cut doesn't come until 4:30 into the song, and the sequence has just four cuts in total.
• 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.
• Stranger by the Lake: The shot where Michel drowns his lover and then leaves the lake, walks back towards his clothes, gets dressed and then leaves, is all one continuous shot.
• Sucker Punch features a futuristic fantasy sequence where the main characters storm a moving train, and have to fight a horde of gun-toting robots to get to a ticking time bomb. The next 2-and-a-half-minute fight scene is composed as one (mostly-CGI) shot, with the camera moving between each character, and even in and out of the train itself.
• In the first Superman film, Superman flies off Lois' balcony and seconds later within the same shot Clark appears at her door. The part of the shot where Lois watches Superman fly away is actually Margot Kidder looking at a rear projection. It's also not a single take, but two shots very cleverly edited together.
• In Tatie Danielle (1990), one shot shows Sandrine and Danielle starting to drive off after leaving Danielle's dog in the park, then pulling back after Sandrine remembers that the dog wasn't wearing its collar, Sandrine getting out of the car, Sandrine putting the collar on the dog, Sandrine getting back into the car, and the car leaving the park (for real this time).
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Shredder's introduction is done with a long, lingering shot down the corridor that swoops to the side as he walks down the hallway and meets his men, then goes behind him as his henchman helps with his cape.
• Dario Argento's Tenebre takes a crane shot up one side of a building, over the roof, and down the other, for no reason other than that it's awesome.
• John Connor's helicopter crash in the opening sequence of Terminator Salvation.
• Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line uses the technique in some of the tracking shots during the hill assault scenes.
• Tomorrowland features one as Casey takes her first full trip into the eponymous city.
• Tom-Yum-Goong (aka The Protector):
  • Features a four-minute ^note the time was chosen specifically because that was how much usable footage could be shot with a single canister of 35mm film one-shot elaborate fight sequence that reportedly took eight days to get right in which Tony Jaa fights his way up a building. Up multiple sets of stairs and through rooms, with occasional pans out and back again to show extras landing after being thrown over the railings. The only CGI in the whole sequence is a window breaking, and only because the real prop didn't work right and cheating it in with CGI was cheaper than rebuilding the entire set for another take.
  • Another occurres during a fight in the old Redfern tram depot, against bikers, skateboarders, and roller-skaters.
• Top Secret! contains a scene where the protagonists visit a Swedish bookstore to learn how they can make contact with the leader of the Resistance. It's a relatively short scene as far as oners go, but the actors performed everything in reverse, then the clip was spliced backward into the film, making the dialogue sound suitably foreign and resulting in some gravity-defying effects.
• The Train (black-and-white WWII film with Burt Lancaster) has some wonderful long tracking shots. They also wreck a lot of real trains.
• The Trope Maker is probably A Trip Down Market Street, a 13-minute documentary film from 1906 that is just that, namely, a 13-minute ride down Market Street in San Francisco. Almost all of it is a single take.
• Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning utilizes this method more than once, to differentiate itself from the previous three installments. It opens with a first-person perspective scene of John being attacked in his house and watching his family die, while John's final rampage through the Unisol compound in particular is an uninterrupted 5-minute shootout against legions of mooks.
• Waiting... has one very long and very impressive continuous shot, all done with a freehand camera to emphasis the chaoticness of the dinner rush, that pans through the entire restaurant with every major character actively doing something as it passes by and ends with Raddimus getting busy in the bathroom. During a rehearsal of it that was filmed (found in the extra scenes of the DVD), Ryan Reynolds who appears near the end of the shot remarks how badly he'd love to completely ruin the shot on purpose.
• A quite powerful one near the end of Wall Street, as Charlie Sheen is arrested for insider trading and slowly breaks down in tears during the long walk out of the office.
• In The Wiz, Dorothy sings "Home" through one long closeup of her face, surrounded by images of her friends and family.
• Darren Aaronofsky's The Wrestler has two extended sequences which follow its protagonist from just behind his shoulders.
• The 2017 Chinese historical drama Youth (2017) has exactly one action scene in it, set during the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, and it is a 6 and a half-minute long continuous take.

Live-Action TV

• In 19-2, a spine-chilling 13-minute tracking shot shows the comings and goings of multiple police agents trying to stop a school shooting.
• The intro of the Angel Investigations gang on their first day of work at Wolfram & Hart in "Conviction" is a oner, and featured every starring member of the cast.
• In Babylon 5, they almost managed one but were foiled by a Special Effects Failure. In "Severed Dreams" Delenn's speech to the Grey Council is meant to be one continuous take, with the camera following her behind the councilors in a circle. And it almost worked... except when Mira Furlan attempted to break the staff in half ("then the Council should be broken!") the prop staff didn't break on the first take.
  • Joseph Michael Straczynski is a fan of this type of shot and likes to get away with it when he can. He's particularly proud of one in "Conflists of Interest" When Ivonova went down to Epsilon 3 and had a dialogue with a Zathras there as it was all one take with very fast dialogue.
• The penultimate Band of Brothers episode "Why we Fight" opens with a shot of a violin being taken out of a case. The camera pulls back to reveal the full string quartet playing in a bombed-out German town, and then executes a complicated maneuver around the town square, showing the townsfolk salvaging whatever they can from the rubble, before tilting up to reveal some members of Easy Company standing in what's left of the upper story of a house. The shot only lasts a couple of minutes, but must have taken ages to set up. (The violin also Bookends the end of the episode.)
• 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.
• Believe, being co-created by Alfonso Cuaron, naturally, has a few short oners in its pilot episode.
• The Better Call Saul episode "Fifi" opens with a pretty impressive four minute long continuous shot created with the help of some CGI trickery, following Hector Salamanca's drug mule as his ice cream truck goes through a customs inspection at a United States border crossing.
• British police series The Bill used it a lot in the very early days of its existence, when the remit was to create a kind of documentary effect. A good example is the 1995 episode "Good Intentions" which has 4 takes over the 22 minute episode. The first lasts approximately 6 minutes and follows characters outdoors and indoors and up and down stairwells. The second and third last approximately 3 minutes each. The fourth, which includes several parts of the police station set, lasts 12 minutes. Towards the end of the series the show tended to rely more on using Whip Pans and other camera tricks to break up scenes. However, the very final shot of the show is a classic Oner, going through the station and ceremonially saying goodbye to the characters.
• Breaking Bad:
  • Jesse goes through a long explanation of how he's expected to teach the Mexican Cartel how to cook Walt's meth, followed by Walt cruelly refusing to help him, all done in one take with some very impressive acting by Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul.
  • The final shot of "Crawl Space" is one long pull out shot, showing Walt lying in the titular crawl space after realizing that Gus plans to kill his entire family and he doesn't have the money he needs to run away from them. The crawl space almost looks like a grave. This has caused many fans to believe that Walter died in the crawl space, and only Heisenberg remained.
  • The opening of season 2 episode "Better Call Saul" is a great example of a faked Oner: while it looks like a single, uninterrupted shot, the editors actually used people and cars passing through the foreground to hide the cuts between different takes.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The filming of the song "The Parking Ticket" from "Once More, With Feeling" 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 "Anne", as the gang returns to school; it runs for 3:30, features every main character plus all minor characters important for the episode, and is book-ended by two scenes showing Buffy in L.A., just to ram it home how utterly alone she is.
  • Whedon actually uses one in the very first episode of the show and comments about this very fact in the DVD commentary.
• For the final episode of its 31st season, and to commemorate the series' 30th anniversary, British hospital drama CASUAL+Y made British television history by recording a Oner... that was 48 minutes long. Even more impressive was the fact that they managed to switch cameramen halfway through (after about 20 minutes, the camera would just be too heavy) and that they managed to nail it in under ten takes.
• Chicago P.D. Season 8, Episode 8 "Protect and Serve" features a 360 degree shot with members of the Intelligence Unit being asked questions by the shrink.
• The Chosen, "Matthew 4:24" opens with an impressive fifteen-minute tracking shot.
• Cobra Kai:
  • The Season 2 finale features one during the school brawl between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do, showcasing the students of both dojos fighting in the hallway while the rest of the school watches and takes videos.
  • There's another one in the Season 3 finale, tracking around the LaRusso's house during the fight between the invading members of Cobra Kai and the Miyagi-Do/Eagle Fang alliance.
• The Comedy Bang! Bang! episode "Tom Lennon Wears Black Slacks and a Black Skinny Tie" is made of long takes divided only by commercial breaks. In the episode, the editors go on strike, and Scott attempts to prove that he can do the show without any cuts or edits (and can also make a three pointer at the end of it).
• In Community, the opening scene of Season 2 is a continuous panning shot over multiple sets as the characters wake up to the first day of the new college year.
• In the Covert Affairs season 2 episode "World Leader Pretend" there's a magnificent Oner where the heroine is trying to shepherd a defector to safety through a busy hotel kitchen (!). It looks like it would have been... challenging, to say the least!
• In the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episode "Josh's Sister is Getting Married!," Greg has an entire song, "I Could If I Wanted To", done all in one take.
• Crisis features a 7 and a half minute long fight sequence during Episode 8 when the SIT unit attacks the headquarters of the Light of God cult.
• The two-part episode Quentin Tarantino directed for CSI includes such a shot. The camera first films the CSIs talking around a table, before following Sarah across the entire lab as she goes to fetch a suspect's file in another room.
• The final episode of Jon Stewart's tenure on The Daily Show includes an awesome one-continuous-shot camera tour of the program's off-stage facilities and offices, with pretty much everyone — studio staff, writers, prop people, designers, etc. — who contributed to Stewart's appearances and routines getting a cameo. This was also a clear sendup to the famous Goodfellas example. With the help of some creative editing, which is of course lampshaded.
  Editor: Are we going to have to edit this later?
  Jon Stewart: No, no, it's all one shot! Let me just spin the camera here...
• The Da Vinci's Inquest episode "It's Backwards Day" begins with a ten-minute scene that looks like a full oner, but has at least two edits (a whip pan just before Detective McNab arrives on the scene, and a shot following Officer McNab (the detective's daughter) when she is walking towards a witness for an interview). During this scene, Da Vinci is investigating a hit-and-run by talking to five different people (two uniformed officers, a paramedic, a detective, and an eyewitness), discussing the failure of his "safe injection site" plan with Detective McNab, and flirting with Officer McNab. Even though it's been edited, it's very well executed.
• The intro to Drop the Dead Donkey follows Damien out of the editing suite, switches to other characters as they pass through the busy office (passing all the main characters), moves on to the news-desk set and ends just as they go on air.
• ER often used continuous tracking shots (achieved through extensive use of the Steadicam) to stress the intensity of the moment, during mass casualty incidents when the whole cast scrambles to save several lives simultaneously. Rather than cut between different events, the camera just follows characters between rooms and circle around them as they work.
  • One of the earliest examples of this is the first season episode "Blizzard" which contains a five-and-a-half minute long mass casualty scene that contains just 16 cuts. It includes a very impressive 100-second long tracking shot that moves around the entire ER set and features every cast member.
  • The frequency of these kinds of scenes inspired the cast and crew to broadcast an entire episode live from start to finish. The episode was called "Ambush", and while it did feature multiple cameras, it was essentially done in a single take (technically two takes, since they did the show twice, once for the East Coast timeslot, and once for the West Coast).
  • In Season 4's "Exodus", we get the opposite of the usual use, as it features a quite haunting 40-second long tracking shot of a completely empty and abandoned ER.
• Escape at Dannemora: Sweat's dry run of his prison escape is filmed in a single shot as he navigates the labyrinthine service corridors of the prison and through an incredibly long tunnel to the manhole cover outside the prison walls. There are a few disguised cuts as the camera spins back and forth to focus on Sweat and the path ahead.
• Firefly:
  • In "Objects in Space", the second-to-last shot of the episode was one long shot over about a minute, showing each member of the crew. It was intended to show that River had been accepted onto the ship as one of the crew, as opposed to a passenger, by having her appear with everyone else on the ship. The scene ends with Summer Glau and Jewel Staite in the cargo bay of the ship. Because everything had to go right in one take, if anyone made a mistake, they'd have to start the whole scene over again. When Summer kept screwing up, forcing a reshoot because the very last part of the long scene (it's about 5-7 minutes long) was screwed up, it necessarily ended up frustrating the other cast members, who, from the other side of the set, would cry out "SUUUUMMER!" whenever she messed up. This became a behind-the-scenes running gag: whenever someone would screw up, they'd shout "SUUUUMMER!"
  • An outtake had one of these as Nathan Fillion rushed around to appear in four places in a close-up rotation amongst the cast at a funeral, ending with him in the casket with the corpse. Suffice to say, the other actors quickly corpsed.
• The Flash:
  • In "Think Fast", although there is a brief transition at the beginning as DeVoe shrinks a guard and steps on him, the remainder of the scene—lasting for one minute and twenty-five seconds—is an extended tracking shot of DeVoe using his various powers to take out the A.R.G.U.S. facility guards in various ways.
  • In "The Last Temptation of Barry Allen, Part 2" there is a roughly two-minute long, mostly uninterrupted camera take of Kamilla and Cecile fleeing Ramsey's zombified thralls in their office building.
• Game of Thrones: Has practically become a tradition for their major battle sequences.
  • During "The Watchers on the Wall", the penultimate episode of season 4, there is a continuous, unbroken shot of the battle happening in the center yard at Castle Black, which slowly pans in a complete circle showing how the battle is playing out for pretty much everyone at The Wall.
  • In "Hardhome", we get one with Jon Snow moving from the wight-covered gate to the Wildlings' meeting hut in order to retrieve the dragonglass daggers he brought with him in order to emphasize how much of a massacre it is.
  • In "Battle of the Bastards", directed by the same director as Hardhome, in the thick of the battle with the Boltons, there's a long shot of Jon on the battlefield killing as many soldiers as he can. Cavalry are charging everywhere, arrows are constantly falling and it's sometimes difficult to tell who's a foe and who's not. It's used to emphasize the utter chaos of such a battle as well as how most of the time, survival is based on luck as much as skill, as Jon only survives because of sheer luck multiple times.
  • During "The Spoils of War", the camera focuses on Bronn's navigation through a battlefield, passing by screaming soldiers, fires everywhere and Drogon flying overheard, burning everything in his path, pushing the fact that for the Lannisters, this is less of a CMOA and more of horrific massacre.
  • In the penultimate episode of the series, "The Bells," there's a striking and brutal long take following Arya as she tries to navigate her way through King's Landing while Daenerys attacks it from atop her dragon. The shot emphasizes the chaos and violence of the attack.
  • House of the Dragon continues the tradition of long takes. The sixth episode, "The Princess and the Queen" begins with a long take of Rhaenyra Targaryen giving birth to her third son and being summoned by Queen Alicent immediately afterwards, followed by another, even longer take of her making the arduous walk from her chambers to the queen's. The switch in subject matter hammers home the running theme that the childbed is akin to the battlefield.
• The Good Place: In the series finale, there is one long shot where Eleanor walks from the pizza place to her house to Michael's office and back to her house, without any visible cuts, all while still hiding how Janet comes and goes as she pleases.
• The Haunting of Hill House (2018):
  • Episode 6 has five long takes, the longest of which is 18 minutes. Because it covers two separate time periods and different locations, a rigged set was built with elevators and hidden doors for the crew and cast (and their body doubles) to run around.
  • Episode 7 has a pretty long take just of Horace Dudley telling Hugh about his family's past with Hill House. It just slowly zooms in on him over the entire story.
• High School Musical: The Musical: The Series has "Something in the Air", the musical number that opens season 2. It's almost seamless, with only two transition spots where they could hide the edits.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • The two-minute date at the end of the episode "Ten Sessions" (better known as the one with Britney Spears).
  • In the episode "The Naked Man," the camera pans away from Ted to follow another character; when it pans back ten seconds later he's managed to take off all his clothes.
  • The episode "Gary Blauman" contains a 2 and a half minute guest star studded panning one shot.
• The It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode "Charlie Work" features a seven minute-long sequence with the appearance of one shot following Charlie as he takes the health inspector around the bar and orchestrates the other characters to make the building seem up to code. There's some very seamless trickery to combine the footage together, as the Paddy Pub's interior set is not in the same location as its exterior.
• Jane the Virgin:
  • The first episode of the fifth season has a long take as Jane totally loses her mind over the events of the beginning of the episode.
  • In the fifth and final season there's one where Jane has a breakdown over the contents of her telenovela life, unanimously hailed as a career highlight for Gina Rodriguez.
• Kamen Rider: Episode 65 has an 80-second continuous shot of Hongo fighting his way through a line of Shocker goons below a miniature ski lift. The camera is mounted on one of the ski lift cars, following the action.
• The Key & Peele sketch "How Not to Remember Where You Parked Your Car" appears to be an unbroken two-minute shot.
• Late Night with Seth Meyers: Parodied in the Oscar Bait trailer as among the many tropes you'll see in such a film. And including the reasons for it too — to impress viewers and critics with the technical feat, and to drive home an emotional point.
  Announcer: Boom! There's your Oscar, motherfuckers!
• A faked Oner/tracking shot appears in the BBC/Discovery Channel documentary Life in the "Plants" episode, where the camera glides through a moss-covered tree while plants grow over an entire season in fast-forward. The whole thing took two years to compile due to the different growing rates of the plants and lasts one minute on screen.
• The Longest Day in Chang'an: The opening scene is two minutes long, only one shot, and moves all over the city.
• 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 Lampshade Hanging in The Tag, when Paul and Jamie are watching and discussing a movie filmed in that way - Paul points out how difficult this is for the actors, while Jamie (who had actually flubbed one of her lines) merely claims "It's their job!"
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil:
    • "Cut Man" ends with a five minute long fight scene in a hallway where Matt, already heavily injured, takes on a dozen men. It's not a true oner (a little digital trickery disguises the cuts) but it plays and looks exactly like one.
    • "World On Fire" contains a long cut in a dark alleyway, with various actions and the tail-end of a fight scene between Matt and some of Vladimir's men taken in by a wide-angle camera inside a car.
    • "New York's Finest" has a lengthy fight scene between Matt and a bunch of bikers, first in a hallway and then down a flight of stairs. Though there are several cuts, it's given the appearance of one take.
    • "Blindsided" has an 11 minute-long continuous shot. Without the camera once changing angles, Matt fights off a bunch of inmates Wilson Fisk has hired to kill him, then takes down a pair of guards in Fisk's pocket, gets the Albanian mob boss in the jail to give up the name of the inmate Fisk paid to shank him, and convinces said inmate to have one of his men disguise himself as a guard to escort Matt out of the prison, fighting off other inmates and guards on Fisk's payroll, then follows Matt as he exits into the courtyard and into a waiting taxi, the single shot ending just as sedatives Matt was injected with at the start of the fight kick in. Production had to be stopped for a full day to allow the cast and crew to rehearse it. The directors actually designed the shot to allow some digital stitching if necessary, then went back and lightened the moments in question to make it clear to the audience that this hadn't happened. And whereas the "Cut Man" one-take saw Charlie Cox switch places with his stunt double Chris Brewster a few times, here Cox performs about 95% of the fight, only switching with Brewster for two points where Matt gets thrown through the air. Plus, it features firebombs and blood spray, increasing the technical difficulty.
  • The Defenders: There's a pretty impressive lengthy shot at the start of the team-up Hallway Fight, which starts with Matt and Jessica arriving, Luke and Danny's boardroom brawl with Hand henchmen breaking through the wall in front of them, both groups exchanging words with one another, and Matt sensing Elektra approaching.
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The episode "The Dirty Half Dozen", which aired just a few weeks after the Daredevil season 1 one-take fight, contains a few minutes-long fight scene with the camera following Skye as she expertly cuts down an entire room of HYDRA agents. Bask in its glory for yourself. Even better, there was no stunt double. It was all Chloe Bennet. She messed up and broke her arm in the middle, but stayed in character long enough to finish the scene.
  • Loki: The climax of the episode "Lamentis" is filmed and stitched together to look like one shot.
  • Ms. Marvel: In "Crushed", the Clique Tour scene starts on Bruno, Nakia and Kamala, then the camera makes fast-forward moves to focus on each of the described cliques in one uninterrupted shot. (Although some quick camera blurs may obfuscate a few cuts.)
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is known for featuring continuous tracking shots.
  • The second season opens with one of these to show Midge in her new job in the basement switchboard at B. Altman. It's not entirely a single oner, but rather, two separate shots stitched together with CGI (this being where we see the camera follow a letter sent down the mail chute to the basement).
  • "We're Going to the Catskills" features a lengthy oner during the initial Steiner dance challenge. This one sees Midge race around the dance floor looking for dance partners with initials matching her own, during which she sets up one couple and has a chat with one of the Steiner employees. It even continues after the initial dance ends into the next dance, as Midge slowly waltzes with Joel.
  • The season 4 episode "How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?" has a three-minute oner where Midge, Lenny Bruce, and dozens of extras try to escape the backstage of a burlesque show during a police raid.
• The entire Mr. Robot episode "Eps3.4runtime-error.r00" appears to be this, and was aired without commercials, although there are cleverly hidden edits.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 is made of these — all the host segments are done in a mere one take, with the exceptions of ones featuring the Mads as they have the cheat of cutting back and forth between the Satellite of Love and the Mads' base. The theater segments, which usually last anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes depending on the placement of host segments and commercials, also have to be done in one take to maintain continuity. This can result in some Throw It In! moments; such as "Repticulus", where Jonah dropping the wooden monster cutouts was not in the script.
• Northern Exposure: a rather memorable one occurs in the episode "Get Real." The scene begins with Joel in his truck; the camera is clamped to the door of the truck looking at Joel through the driver's side window. He offers Enrico Belotti (The Flying Man) a ride into town. When Mr. Belotti declines the offer, Joel drives off, drilling himself in preparation for his internal medicine Board exams as he goes. When he gets to town, there's Mr. Belotti waiting for him by the side of the road, looking like he's been through some vigorous exercise—and Joel realizes that they don't call Mr. Belotti "The Flying Man" for nothing.
• Patriot occasionally films scenes in one continuous take:
  • In season one, there is at least one instance of a depressed John sitting in a field as person after person stops by to deliver some bit of news, information or command that will make John's life more difficult. You can even see people in the background slowly making their way towards him long before they arrive.
  • In season two, en Epic Tracking Shot follows John walking from a subway to a grocery store, where he and his friends rob the clerk and get shot, then nonchalantly walk back to the subway, all narrated by John in the form of a folk song.
• Planet Earth included a shot of wild African dogs chasing a gazelle. While the pack strategies used by hunting canines was well understood, an entire hunt had never before been filmed from start to finish. The camera crew used a single camera to capture the hunt from a helicopter in one long shot, which is detailed in the "Making Of" featurette on the DVD.
• Episode 4 of Psychoville is a comic homage to Rope, but manages to one-up the original by shooting the entire 28-minutes of action in just two takes, the first of which was 17 minutes long - something that was only possible on video, since film cameras only contain 10-minute reels.
• Schitt's Creek: The fourth season Christmas Episode opens with a Flashback to one of the Roses' famous Christmas Parties, and the single long shot contains a number of easter eggs.
• 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 Donald Faison's inability to sink a three-pointer on cue.
• The series 4 opener of Skins begins with one of these. It's comfortably the best thing about the episode.
• Stargate-verse:
  • In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Fallen", one of the first scenes follows Jonas from Level 18, into the elevator, down to Level 28, and into the briefing room, all in one continuous shot.
  • One of the direct-to-video movies, Stargate: Continuum, opens with one of these directly, starting in the Gateroom as one team arrives from offworld, then travels through the base, and back to the Gateroom again as SG-1 prepare to leave.
• Star Trek:
  • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Naked Time" has a long one-shot scene with Nimoy that is quite memorable.
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Sarek", Picard mind-melds with Sarek to temporarily take on some of the burden of the latter's emotions, as he is losing his ability to suppress them. There is an incredible revolving shot of Picard as he experiences a breakdown under the influence of Sarek's emotions and thoughts.
  • The Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Disease" features a one-take argument between Janeway and Harry that goes from the conference room to the bridge to Janeway's ready room.
• Star Wars:
  • Obi-Wan Kenobi: The second shot of "Part I" follows the Jedi Minas Velti leading a group of Younglings through the halls of the Temple and defending them from the Clone Troopers until she's cut down by blaster fire. The shot continues with the Younglings realizing they need to run and heading off on their own as fighting continues all around them.
  • The Book of Boba Fett, "Return of the Mandalorian": From the moment Din Djarin takes the elevator, arrives at the bar, discusses with his employer (with an Orbital Shot around the table), departs through the same elevator and till he exits it, all of this is one uninterrupted continuous shot with the camera following him.
• Stranger Things:
  • In the episode "Dear Billy" a shoot-out is done in a single take of just over the minute.
  • "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab" has a "hidden cut" Oner in the scene where Steve, Robin, Nancy and Eddie are fighting Demobats.
• In the Supernatural episode "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part One" (S02, Ep21), there is a single long uncut shot after Jake enters the schoolroom. The camera pans across the empty chalkboard and then pans around the schoolroom in a circle until the chalkboard is seen again, but now the chalkboard is covered with the sentence "I will not kill" written over and over again.
• Each The Television Ghost episode consisted of a single fifteen-minute shot of George Kelting's face as he told a story.
• Third Watch's 100th episode, "A Call For Help" consisted of 4 Oners, each comprising about 10 minutes of screen time.
• Rick Mercer's rants, beginning Deliberately Monochrome on This Hour Has 22 Minutes and continuing (in full color) on the The Rick Mercer Report. Comedienne Elvira Kurtz, on her short-lived series Popcultured!, did a bit showing all the work that goes into these Oners, including holding up a mirror to show the cameraman walking backwards and keeping pace with her with a full rig on his shoulder.
• The end of the True Detective episode "Who Goes There?" In order to find a serial killer, Cohle goes back undercover with an East Texas biker gang the suspect is dealing meth to. The gang goes into the projects dressed as cops to rob a stash house. There is a six-minute long steadicam shot from where Cohle and the gang breaks into the drug den, hold the occupants there hostage as they rob the place, things go very wrong, Cohle incapacitates his contact and leaves, calls Hart to pick them up and tries to get out of the projects as the police arrive. You can watch it here.
• The West Wing:
  • The series opens 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).
  • Quite a few of their Walk and Talk scenes were done as Oners.
  • The fourth episode, "Five Votes Down", includes a three-minute tracking shot of the senior staff leaving a venue after President Bartlet gives a speech. For added complexity the scene was shot on location rather than the usual soundstages and at some points required the cameraman to walk backwards to keep the cast in shot.
• Wu Tang An American Saga: Season 1, Episode 8 "Labels" features five continuous long takes for each Act of the episode. There are hidden cuts, but each Act happens in a different location in real time as Bobby embarks on his first journey through the music business.
• 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. It was the one shot in the episode where the camera was focused entirely on one character from start to finish. The camera tracked her for 10 minutes, 20 seconds as she engaged in separate but continuous conversations with The Lone Gunmen at her desk, Skinner in his office, Kirsh in his office, Spender in the X-Files office, and again with Skinner in the elevator (who managed to get to first base with Scully before Mulder) before escaping in The Lone Gunmen's van. Brilliant.

Music Videos

• Spice Girls, "Wannabe." Actually three shots, broken up by what looks like two very short pans over and "through" walls.
• Utada Hikaru's Hikari featuring Utada washing dishes in one take
• While perhaps recorded piecemeal due to both its length (the video is nearly nine minutes long) and places where cuts were either convenient or necessary, the video for Between The Buried And Me's The Coma Machine follows a solitary character as he wanders through various strange mindscape-y rooms, finally meeting the comatose man who features on the album's cover. Judging by the facial hair, the only two people seen in the whole video are representations of the same man.
• Lisa Hannigan did this twice in support of her album Passenger:
  • "Little Bird" — she lip-syncs the song at 4.5x speed while submerged in a bathtub in her mother's house.
  • "Knots" — she performs the song against a white backdrop in a white dress while she gets progressively Covered in Gunge in real time.
• Goodshirt quite likes these. Two in particular are:
  • "Blowing Dirt" — a car is demolished over the course of the video (with the demolition played back in reverse).
  • "Sophie" — a girl sits listening to music on her headphones while behind her burglars strip her apartment completely bare.
• OK Go has made quite a lot of these:
  • "A Million Ways" — an elaborately choreographed dance sequence.
  • "Here It Goes Again" — an elaborately choreographed dance sequence on treadmills.
  • WTF? — a elaborate dance sequence carried out in front of a green screen in order to have trails behind everything on screen.
  • This Too Shall Pass — an elaborate outdoors dance sequence with the Notre Dame marching band.
  • This Too Shall Pass again — an elaborate sequence with a Rube Goldberg Device synchronized with the music.
    • The Rube Goldberg video isn't quite a true oner, and the band has admitted to such. The machine worked in its entirety three times (each time filmed as a continuous take), but the video contains at least one well-disguised cut in order to sync better with the music.
  • White Knuckles — an elaborate dance sequence with trained dogs.
  • Arguably End Love — a single live-action sequence shot over 18 hours with a mixture of stop-motion and Overcranking. Among the signs of its Oner-ness: a local goose named Maria that took a shine to the band and hung around them during most of the shoot. The video finishes with a timelapse shot of the skyline that compresses eight full days into four seconds of runtime.
  • The theme of The Oner dance sequences is so strongly associated with the band that when a contest was made to make a music video for "I'm Not Through", the winning video was one.
  • "I Won't Let You Down", done in slightly speeded up motion with a drone camera.
  • "Upside Down & Inside Out", both is, and is not. The video was shot in one take, but due to the parabolic airplane arcs they could only get 27 seconds of microgravity at a time, and then had to wait five minutes for the plane to reset position. They just held as still as possible while waiting and edited out the holds.
  • "The One Moment" is a single take where the first three minutes of the video are slowed down from footage that took 4.2 seconds to film, which is shown at the beginning. The footage doesn't stop at that point, nor did it begin there.
    • This is one case where the band couldn't film the video in one shot. There are no robot-mounted cameras capable of filming the 4.2 second sequence, so the band had to film in segments and edit them together.
  • "The Writing's On The Wall" is a music video featuring various optical illusions made utilizing certain clothes, numerous mirrors, and specific camera placement.
• Eagle-Eye Cherry, "Save Tonight", Not a true oner, as there are hidden cuts that allow Eagle-Eye to play all the important roles, but it is presented as such.
• Jamiroquai, "Virtual Insanity", Not a true oner, but rather separate shots bridged together with extreme upwards and downwards camera tilts, creating an illusion of a single shoot.
• "El Sol no Regresa" by La Quinta Estación.
• Sting's video "Fortress Around Your Heart" is mostly a Oner. Most of the video is one long black & white shot mixed with a few "making-of" shots in color.
• TheProdigy, "Smack My Bitch Up" from The Fat of the Land, also filmed in first person with a Tomato in the Mirror ending.
• "Nothing Compares 2 U" by Sinéad 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.
• R.E.M.'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.
  • Here's a recreation of the complete footage.
  • Prior to that, they made another such video for a song called "Bang and Blame" for their album Monster.
• Coldplay:
  • "Yellow".
  • And "Christmas Lights".
• 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.
• The incredible "Red Hands" by Walk Off the Earth is a single video take, but every line of the song was filmed in the wrong order. The video speeds up, slows down, and reverses to sync the itself to the music. The music video therefore keeps the music as one straight track - to see the video unedited with the audio synced, click here.
  • "What Do You Mean?" is another example of a Oner.
• Radiohead has done this a few times:
  • "No Surprises" from OK Computer 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.
  • "Man of War" is a crazy variant on the trope in that the sequence of events are choreographed as a singular take, but it regularly flips between two variations of itself, one taking place during the daytime and another at night, with elements from each eventually bleeding into one another. In essence, it's a oner that seamlessly splices in a shot-for-shot remake of itself.
• Bruce Springsteen's "Brilliant Disguise".
  • Also from Bruce, "If I Should Fall Behind"
• 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", notable for being shot in a very confined space and having the entire room filling with water the whole time.
• 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...
• Mutemath's video "Typical" where the band had to perform the song from "finish to start" reversing the lyrics so their lips sync up when the music is dubbed over. Actually consists of two shots (the lead singer obscures the camera partway through to hide a cut), but the overall impression is of a Oner.
  • 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" from Cave's album Murder Ballads.
• Animusic's "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.^note Perhaps a homage to a similar sequence in Phantom of the Paradise.
  • Both Oners were shot simultaneously, so lead singer Dan Wilson had to run back and forth so he could be in the shots at the right times.
  • 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 AmiYumi'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.)
• Will Young's Leave Right Now, which took several takes to get right and resulted in a large amount of bruises for a large amount of the cast. Especially Will.
• Inugami Circus Dan's "Honto ni honto ni gokurosan."
• Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)". This is one of those cases where it took a few takes to film (about three) the video, but it was edited to seem like a Oner though there are a few dozen visible camera shifts in the final product (not counting the flashing at the end).
• IU - Friday
• Janet Jackson's "When I Think of You" is actually two oners merged by an edit at around 3:19 (when the photographer's flash goes off.)
• Alanis Morissette's "Head Over Feet"
• U2's "The Sweetest Thing" (except for the beginning where the girl gets into the vehicle), as well as "Numb".
• Lisa Stansfield's "Never Never Gonna Give You Up."
• Ludo's "Love Me Dead".
  • This acually employs the well-disguised cut at least once.
• Lisa Mitchell's "Neapolitan Dreams".
• Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World" is displayed this way, with Kylie walking around a town square, but as she walks back to the start people and objects in the background start repeating, along with past versions of Kylie singing.
• The Chemical Brothers' "Star Guitar" is also shown as a Oner, but again is obviously CGI. The various components of the song are displayed as objects passing by when looking out of a train window. Both this and the above example were directed by Michel Gondry, who seems to be fond of this trope.
• Weezer, "Undone (The Sweater Song)", which was shot on a steadicam at a faster frame rate, using a sped-up version of the song. The process was so lengthy and arduous that after the 14th take, the band gave up the idea of taking the video seriously and goofed off in front of the camera.
• "The Denial Twist" from Get Behind Me Satan by The White Stripes.
• "Second Go" by Lights.
• Serj Tankian's "Sky Is Over"
• LoadingReadyRun's "Desert Bus Killed the Internet Star" - Featuring 7 people in one small room (full of couches/electronics to be maneuvered around), with the camera being handed off 3 times.
• Sara Bareilles's "Gravity".
• Charlotte Hatherley's "White" is another reversed Oner... in which she also plays the guitar in reverse, all the while being pelted with paint.
• Electrasy's "Morning Afterglow" is also a reversed Oner. There is also a making-of video showing how it was done.
• "Free As A Bird" from The Beatles Anthology by The Beatles is made to look like this, even though it would be utterly impossible for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that they include old clips of The Beatles spliced in.
• The first half of Theory of a Deadman's "Hate My Life" is a single shot of Tyler Connolly walking through the city and singing while the camera follows him and events around him reflect the lyrics. Then after the second chorus he joins the band on a parade float for the guitar solo and it becomes a more traditional performance video.
• LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends". Up close and personal, with added face paint.
• Robyn's "Call Your Girlfriend" uses it very effectively, with some intense (and seemingly improvised) dance moves and an equally intense light show going on around the Swedish pop star.
• "The Lazy Song" by Bruno Mars appears to be this.
• "Evlenmeliyiz" ("We Should Get Married") by Turkish pop singer Hadise, which breaks the fourth wall in playful fashion.
• "Mad World" by Gary Jules.
• "Americanarama" by Hollerado.
• "Happiness" by Goldfrapp. Appears to be one-shot,^note 0.45 goes behind SUV, 1.19 after garbage bin lids, 1.58 goes behind red phone box, 2.19 goes behind telephone pole, 2.56 behind pole before giving flowers, 3.14 bike stunt while dancing with 3 girls one has to wonder what kind of fitness is needed for over 3 minutes of bunny hopping.
  • Also look at "Twist."
• "Anti-D" by the Wombats. An emotionless Murph walks through a suburb while strange and improbable things happen around him until, halfway through, he is mauled by some doctors. They leave, all the colorful characters from before help him up into a chair they've suddenly acquired, lift the chair onto their shoulders, and carry him down the street, throwing confetti and holding balloons. All of this is one shot.
• The drama version of "It's You" by Super Junior has the camera follow each of the members around a small town square as they walk in and out of the frame for their solos. At the end, they all walk back into frame and come together at the intersection.
• "Who Dat" by J. Cole.
• Charlene Kaye's "Animal Love I". They also helpfully show how it is done.
• In iamamiwhoami's hour-long concert video TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN each number is a single take, stealthily edited together to appear nearly seamless. The tracking shot in "u-1" is particularly long and challenging.
• "Freaks and Geeks" by Childish Gambino
• Green Day's "Redundant" and "Macy's Day Parade".
• The first couple minutes of Extrawelt's "Raum in Raum".
• Taylor Swift does it with super fast costume changes in her video for "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together."
• Reece Mastin does this with his video for Rock Star.
• "Anna Sun" by Walk the Moon. The entire first half of the video (2.5 minutes) is done in one shot, tracking the lead singer through several different rooms while weaving through numerous other background actors/dancers. The band revealed in an interview that they did a total of 22 takes before quitting, and ended up using one of the earliest completed takes for the final video.
• D'Angelo's famous clip for "Untitled (How Does It Feel?)" masquerades as one of these, though it contains a few well-hidden cuts.
• Panic! at the Disco's "Girls/Girls/Boys," which is a homage to "Untitled (How Does It Feel?)".
• Robert DeLong's "Global Concepts" also masquerades as one — its few cuts are hidden by blackouts or blip-edits that match the song's digital "record scratches".
• Janelle Monáe's "Cold War" is a single long take of Janelle's face as she lip-syncs to the song.
• Kerli's "Love is Dead" video is just one shot in front of a changing green screen.
• The Black Keys, "Lonely Boy".
• Most of Adele's Deliberately Monochrome music video for "Someone Like You" consists of a single long shot following her as she walks through the Paris streets.
• Anna Kendrick's music video for "Cups" is a two-er; there's one cut about two-thirds through the video. Interestingly, at one point the guy spinning cups at the bar makes a mistake, but it made it into the final video (presumably it was still the best take they could do).
  • In a possible homage to the original, Sam Tsui's cover of Cups involves the four singers sitting at a table in the park and performing the titular actions, while the camera rotates around them for the entrety of the song in a single shot.
• An alternative version of Suzuko Mimori's "Yakusoku Shite yo, Issho da yo!" consists of a single shot of her dancing to the song while the camera constantly moves back and forward.
• Pharrell Williams' promotion of "Happy", which he initially recorded for the soundtrack of Despicable Me 2. The website "24 Hours of Happy" was Exactly What It Says on the Tin; a 24-hour long interactive music video consisting of 360 different 4-minute long videos of "Happy" (15 per hour). Each video was shot in one take and set up to merge almost seamlessly to the next video, showing either Pharrell (starring in the first video of each hour) or a host of others dancing in various settings around Los Angeles. The performances range from children playing to some fairly sophisticated choreography, and include appearances by Magic Johnson, Jamie Foxx, Kelly Osbourne, Jimmy Kimmel, Steve Carell (the voice of DM2's Gru) and Gru's Minions. The site is no longer up, but the videos are available in 24 hour long blocks on YouTube. Start here at 12-1 am.
• Accordingly, "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody "Tacky" is likewise a single take. It starts off with Al at the top of Los Angeles's Palace Theater in a hideous outfit, then the camera follows different celebrities (Aisha Tyler, Margaret Cho, Eric Stonestreet, Kristen Schaal, Jack Black) as it makes its way down the building, and ends with Al on the ground floor in a different hideous outfit. The really impressive part is they did six takes of it, and every time Al ran down five flights of stairs (while changing clothes!) to make it to the ground floor.
• New Order's "World (The Price of Love)" video takes place at an Italian resort where the camera tracks continuously from the pier to the interior of a hotel, members of the band making brief cameos.
• Canadian-born, New York-based, UK popular Kiesza has a single called "Hideaway," the music video of which is one solid take of her dancing across Brooklyn.
• Metronomy's "Love Letters", a one-shot Dress Rehearsal Video in an unusual structure.
• Shawn Mendes is developing a reputation for these. "Something Big" is one of the few exceptions.
• One Direction: "You & I" is presented this way. With a few interesting twists.
• "Error" by German singer Madeline Juno.
• "Ants Marching/Ode to Joy" by The Piano Guys, utilizing a drone camera.
• Pig with the Face of a Boy's "Middle"/"Climate Change Denier," with an alternate fixed-camera view from above (from a different take).
• The first version of EXO's music video for "Growl". Seeing as the only mistake in the final cut is that Kai's hat falls off (which he proceeds to smoothly pick up) about two/thirds of the way through, it was very well-performed.
• British rapper Stormzy has Know Me From, which has him walk down a street while the lyrics are illustrated with the help of plenty of friends. Played for Laughs when the video cuts to black halfway through to explain that two cars blocked the shoot, although the rest of the video is from the same take.
• "Cups," "Epic Patty Cake Song", and "Coke Bottle Song" are all vids that have song and hand/rhythm filmed in one shot without any mistakes.
• "Var är vi nu?" by Kent
• Played With Italian songwriter Franco Battiato's video for No Time No Space. Most of it is a one-shot Performance Video, but in two instances the camera is focused on a screen showing a clip of whirling dervishes with several cuts.
• The video for the MC Lars song "The Top 10 Things to Never Say on a First Date" is all one shot.
• Perfume's "I Still Love U" It even opens on the clapboard, showing us that this was the 5th take.
• Chico Cesar's "Mama Africa". Which as MTV Brazil showed, is a great example in how a single take video can have many a Funny Background Event.
• The video for a cover of the Bruno Mars hit "Uptown Funk" in Gaelic, performed by the students at a language school in Ireland, is one continuous take.
• "Save Me" by BTS is filmed in one take, with the camera (moving continuously to do things like take a solo shot of a member in one side (with the rest of the members and cinematography team running behind the cameraman in the meantime, as seen here) or moving in between the members to film the ones in the back row. And all of this outdoors on a rainy day (right after the rain stopped, but still).
• Near the beginning of Dua Lipa's "New Rules" video there's one that lasts for an entire minute, covering the first verse and hook in full.
• Lindsey Stirling shot "Warmer in the Winter" as a oner, utilizing quick costume changes and clever set design to pull it off.
• Music/Haim shot the video for "Want You Back" as a true oner, a tracking shot of them walking down an empty street. "Little of Your Love" appears to be a oner through a dance hall but there are several edits that work to make the video appear as such.
• Gin Blossoms' "Allison Road" has the camera moving about in a large (possibly boarding) house, with the band being seen only on televisions kept around the place.
• Lisa Loeb's "Stay", which follows her wandering around what looks like an empty studio-apartment.
• Lou Reed's "No Money Down"...More like a Oner-and-a-half, as the original shot moves away to a picture-in-picture while we see the accompanying hands ripping apart the animatronic Lou head, also a Oner.
• INXS' "Mediate."^note The second half of a two-part song along with "I Need You Tonight." Speed is altered at some points to keep one member's cue card-throwing in sync with the song.
• YouTube channel Game Music Collective made a cover of Ellie's version of Through the Valley in the first teaser for The Last of Us Part II. The whole video consists of an uninterrupted Orbital Shot around the singer playing Ellie, showing other instrumentalists joining her, Ellie's bruised back, a bloody machete, the golf club used to kill Joel, a hooded figure with a rifle and a machete, and then it ends with Ellie finishing the song standing over a dead body. It was confirmed in the comments by the channel to have indeed been one long take.
• The Happy Fits: Not only was the music video for "Go Dumb" filmed in one take, but it was filmed backwards. Lead singer Calvin Langman had to learn how to sing the song backwards before filming.
• Skylar Stecker made two videos for "Only Want You", both of which were done in a single take.
• Leo Moracchioli's metal cover of "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz is Leo following a camera through a mall, in a bunny suit, miming playing the song on his guitar, all done in one shot.
• Cavetown's video for Home is one of someone flipping through a pop-up book - a freaking gorgeous pop-up book, at that - containing the song's lyrics (also making it a Lyric Video).
• Death Grips:
  • "You Might Think..." starts with a 16-second clip of a fire in a fireplace, followed by an uninterrupted shot of MC Ride having a disturbing-looking Freak Out.
  • "On GP" has the three band members sitting in an empty room, barely moving, as the song blares out of a large speaker. For six minutes.
  • "I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States" is uninterrupted footage of the band rehearsing the song using cameras attached to the band members' wrists. The same footage is shown twice: first from Zach's camera, and then again from MC Ride's camera.
• STU48: "Kaze wo Matsu" is a long-take MV shot with a drone.
• Hinatazaka46: "Konna ni Suki ni Natchatte Ii no?" and "Tsuki to Hoshi ga Odoru Midnight" have alternate long-take music videos.
• Arca: "Reverie" is one full uninterrupted take of Arca, dressed in a matador's coat, walking on horse leg-like stilts, singing as a fleshy horn emerges from her genitalia, causing her to bleed until she collapses.

Podcasts

• Discussed on Episode 57 of our own podcast, On the Tropes.

Theatre

• Several plays are staged such that the actors never leave the audience's sight. This is especially common in shows with smaller casts, where two actors might carry out what is essentially a single long scene for the duration of the play.
• This is particularly notable in Les Misérables, where the center portion of the stage is a giant turntable. Some of the transitional songs, such as "Valjean's Soliloquy", use it to achieve a neat effect in which the character walks in place as scenery and other characters rotate in and out around him. This creates the perception of the "camera" following the character as he travels over a long distance and/or time.

Theme Parks

• This is how the Disney Theme Parks 3-D Movie Honey, I Shrunk the Audience is able to have the plot it does. The first half is a oner in which the camera doesn't move, and the scale of the performers and scenery is correctly scaled to appear as if they are actually people on a stage at an awards ceremony. Close-ups of the performers and important actions, and the camerawork of a technician wearing a helmet-mounted camera, appear on a video monitor off to the side of the main screen. Once the audience is "shrunk", the film proceeds to another oner from a very different vantage point. The tricks to accomplish these shots involve, among other things, the power going out somewhat frequently, allowing for surreptitious camera transitioning. At one point, during the shrunken segment; a cart goes by and you can notice that some scientists in the background suddenly appear. Director Randal Kleiser breaks it down in a commentary.

Video Games

• Half-Life is probably the most famous, and earliest (released in 1998) example. All the games directly follow one long shot from Gordon's point of view, differing from other games at the time (and still many now) due to lack of traditional cut scenes or even loading screens (instead simply showing the word "loading" in the center of your view while the next level loads — though this could technically be considered a disguised cut because of how the engine works). The only parts of the series that are less than seamless are when Gordon is knocked unconscious or teleported.
• Far Cry 2: A taxi drive after you arrive in Africa. It describes the setting, the current goings on, information on the game factions and antagonists.
• Call of Duty 4: Has the player in the shoes of overthrown President Al-Fulani, being captured, taken onto a car and driven around, you can see things like a family being killed, armed men breaking into houses, APC's firing on unarmed civilians, a group of your apparent supporters being lined up against a wall and shot, when you arrive, you are taken to a televised/filmed rally, tied to a post, then executed by Khaled Al-Asad.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum's opening sequence with Batman escorting the Joker into Arkham has a feel like this. Batman follows the Joker through multiple hallways and elevators, waits while the Joker is scanned for contraband and given a check-in by a doctor, and is taunted mercilessly by the Joker. Later, in a hallucination, this sequence repeats, only with Batman strapped to a gurney and the Joker escorting him.
  • Batman: Arkham City has a similar one, starting with Bruce Wayne attempting to break free from a chair, beating up a guard (and palming his radio's decryption chip), getting knocked around by a second guard, ordered through processing, going through the bulkhead doors into the city, countering some prisoners while handcuffed, and finally being grabbed and delivered to The Penguin.
  • The ending of Batman: Arkham Knight is a series of consecutive Oners that each have a core theme to tell, representing everything about the Arkham series in half an hour. Spoilers:
    • First up, Batman's quiet introspection about how it all began is interrupted by Hallucination!Joker, who fights Batman with an army of clones until he snaps. This represents the Arkham series' deviation from Batman's core themes of crimefighting to a Beat-Em-Up of endless annoying thugs, which subverts the theme of mercy due to excessive violence.
    • Next is Scarecrow finally defeating The Batman once and for all by forcing Gordon to unmask him. Live. The whole unmasking is a boring, cliché infested B-movie script, downplaying the importance of Batman's secret identity.
    • Next is Batman's worst nightmare played in his head: Hallucination!Joker takes control and kills everyone. You get to use live ammo from the Jokermobile on an entire army, shoot down, and watch Gotham literally burn as the Joker laughs. It's a deconstruction of third-person shooters, as you end up killing the Rogues with little to no effort, as opposed to fighting an army of mooks in strategic combat.
    • Then Hallucination!Joker gets his worst nightmare. You end up shooting boring statues of Batman as Joker's memory is permanently erased from Gotham. This deconstructs First-Person horror games as you end up shooting the same, easy-to-kill enemy over and over.
    • Then Batman and the Arkham Knight turn the tables on Scarecrow, subjecting him to his worst fears and giving us a glimpse of the terrifying Dark Knight that the series was originally famous for.
    • And for the Grand Finale, Bruce Wayne blows up his house while the media watches. It's symbolic of cutting off all ties with Gotham and dying alone against the real enemy: human indulgence.
    • The Stinger shows a new Batman, now with superpowers that are focused on a single trait only: FEAR.
• Dead Space:
  • The series avoids ever "cutting" its camera, from the moment you start a new game to the ending. Even the sparse loading screens zoom the camera up to a computer panel, to zoom away when it's finished.
  • The sequel does this as well: you've never not looking at Isaac.
  • The remake continues this tradition.
• The latest official TrackMania 2: Canyon trailers do this.
• Any sequence in the Assassin's Creed series where Altair/Ezio/Kenway is following someone down a street as they provide exposition creates this feel.
• The opening quest of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim feels like one, even if you have full control over your character, since you're running for your life to escape a dragon that's burning the town around you, taking a long, circuitous route through the town that features no loading point breaks.
• In One Take, you have to film a scene in a single take, following the director's instructions.
• Both God of War (2018) and God of War Ragnarök, serving as a duology Soft Reboot of the God of War franchise commit to making two entire games become these, with no scene cuts, no real loading screens, from the start of the game to the end credits, it's all one long unbroken shot following the characters' perspectives. That's including in Ragnarok when it switches from Kratos to Atreus as the playable character.
• In his more recent games, Hideo Kojima has experimented with long takes in his cutscenes.
  • Both games in the Metal Gear Solid V duology make extensive use of this trope. Kojima's intention was to have as few hard cuts as possible, while seamlessly transitioning to and from gameplay. The opening mission of Ground Zeroes, for instance, has a single, unbroken 8-minute cutscene which then flows seamlessly into gameplay, while the ending cutscene has a single cut (which is actually a Time Skip) over 22 minutes. Depending on how you play the mission, it's perfectly possible for there to be no hard cuts whatsoever until said Time Skip.
  • The trailers for Death Stranding, despite running on a different engine (Decima), have long takes in the same style as Metal Gear Solid V. The Game Awards 2016 trailer had a shot lasting 2.5 minutes, and the Game Awards 2017 trailer had one lasting 5.5 minutes.
• In Halo 5: Guardians, Fireteam Osiris's opening cinematic, where Locke's team assaults a Covenant compound, with all four Spartans given time to shine, and the camera doesn't cut once. It also doubles as a Shout-Out to the opening of Avengers: Age of Ultron, with a huge team fight against an enormous army, the battle being in the snow, taking place in one long shot, plenty of vehicles exploding, and the team leaping up high to "pose" for the camera at the very end.
• Halo Infinite takes cues from the likes of Dead Space and God of War in maintaining a single smooth camera motion throughout the game's entire running time, with smooth transitions in and out of gameplay as well as the few camera cuts being disguised by panning across an object in the foreground or the extremely rare Fade to Black when a time jump is absolutely necessary. Even accessing the in-game menu doesn't break the single take, as it takes the form of a Diegetic Interface the Chief can pull up on his visor.
• A Way Out showcases this beautifully during the escape from the hospital as the gameplay and camera seamlessly shifts between both protagonists while keeping the players on their toes. Leo even gets into a hallway fight that's a clear tribute to the Oldboy scene.
• Yakuza 4 uses a long, interrupted shot to follow Tanimura in the cutscene where he first enters the Little Asia district of Kamurocho. The shot serves a dual purpose: highlighting the destitute and cramped living conditions of the residents as the camera is forced through narrow alleys and tight apartment corridors, and also showing Tanimura's intimacy with the place as he easily navigates through its confusing layout, showing him to be a native before it's brought up in text.

Web Animation

• Mundo Canibal: Happens in some occasions, the most notorious being Tomelirolla's solo animations; they tend to feature him humping a progressively larger group of people while passing through a long scenery, meaning the camera was kept in a single take for an extended period of time. In a 2009 blog post, Ricardo Piologo stated that Tomelirolla's animations were the hardest to produce for this exact reason, and that, although they appeared to be only one long take, he actually made discreet, seamless cuts whenever possible to animate the rest of the take, as it would be even harder for him to actually animate one long take.
• RWBY: The opening scene of Volume 6 begins with a very impressive continuous shot of a speeding train, the Argus Limited, being chased and assaulted by a pack of Manticore Grimm that is led by a Sphinx Grimm; it follows the perspective of one Manticore, from its approach to the train until it is killed by Ruby. The shot then focuses on each member of Team RWBY as they battle the Grimm atop the train before moving to Team JNR who do the same. This shot lasts over one minute and comprises a majority of the first scene of the chapter.

Web Original

• Know Your Meme did a whole episode on this technique, including some of the above.
• As part of a series on Minneapolis businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, a drone operator filmed this 87-second video in a bowling alley and theatre centre. The video quickly went viral earning rave reviews from Hollywood filmmakers.

Web Videos

• Echo Chamber has an episode on Walk and Talk which was done in one take, except for The Stinger after the credits.
• The First Take is a Japanese Youtube channel that hosts various popular artists and invites them to do one of their songs in one take. Mess ups and skipped lines will not prevent them from seeing the song through.
• Ryan vs. Dorkman:
  • Both of the fights open with one of these. 19 seconds in the first one, 30 seconds in the second. (To be sure, 20 seconds isn't that impressive... but all the other examples on here are actual films with actual budgets, as opposed to two untrained amateurs playing with sticks.)
  • Topped by Ryan vs. Brandon 2, by the same team +1 (Dorkman did cinematography). A 23-second Orbital Shot Oner. (Clip starts at the shot, so just rewind to the beginning if you want the whole thing.)
• Daft Hands. Daft Hands. Daft Hands. Daft Hands. Daft Bodies.
• The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan made a 9-minute lipdub of American Pie that was done all in one take.
• LoadingReadyRun did this with "The Writers' Room", a sketch consisting of a single shot over six minutes in length. It was especially challenging as most of the actors had minimal stage experience and weren't used to memorizing all of their lines and cues. "Desert Bus Killed the Internet Star", while shorter, required actors entering and leaving the frame, hiding and passing quickly behind the camera in the middle of a small, furnished room.
• Shorewood Lip Dub is a 4.5 minute long video filmed backwards. It has to be seen to be believed.
• The entries of Marble Hornets vary in length from half a minute to seven minutes, and almost all of them are done in a single shot. It serves both to lend credibility to the premise that it was done hastily by film students on the fly and to make the entries almost unbearably suspenseful.
• Cypress Ranch High School's Anti-Bullying music video is all one long (and impressive, considering the scale) shot, a fact which was overtly parodied by South Park in "Butterballs." An interesting note is that even when one girl blacks out the camera with her hand, it continues to be a single shot.
• collectivecadenza, otherwise known as cdza is an innovative YouTube channel that primarily does their videos as Oners to the point where non-Oners are a Formula-Breaking Episode.
  • Their most well-known video, "Fresh Prince: Google Translated", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, fits this trope.
  • "An Abridged History of Western Music in 16 Genres" (watch here) is just as impressive, as is The Key of Awesome's crossover Hip Hop Shopping Spree.
• Jon Cozart (on the YouTube channel Paint) combines this with Self-Backing Vocalist to carry this out four fold.
• Oners are discussed in the Every Frame a Painting episode, "The Spielberg Oner". In a twist, the focus is on oners that are (or try to be) less conspicuous.
• The sci-fi short film "Mis-Drop" is done in this style. It's actually done in multiple takes, but the cuts are cleverly hidden by the In-Universe Camera, which is damaged and glitching out.
• Discussed in Anime Crimes Division as a prestige TV fight scene hallmark, unlike anime which usually settles for cutaways like Battle Discretion Shot.
• Abigail Thorn from Philosophy Tube is a professional actor, and tends to use this trope to show off. Her video "Men. Abuse. Trauma." was done in a single 31-minute long take in order to reference No Exit, a play that comprises a single uninterrupted scene and which is heavily referenced throughout the video.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd's episode on The Immortal (NES version) was done in one shot. It was James stretching his muscles as a filmmaker.
• Tom Scott's video on whether YouTube will ever run out of video IDs (short answer: not in the next several thousand years) is over five minutes long, has him speak continuously the whole time while walking around a London park with a camera moving with him, has him go through the math based on YouTube's ID system to get to the exact maximum answer (73,786,976,294,838,206,464), all in one take. Which he celebrates with a little Happy Dance at the end of it.
• Most Derrick Comedy videos employ this to some degree, with many of them being done in one shot.
• "Gladiators - fighting to entertain the mob" by Lindybeige consists of Lloyd talking to camera for nearly two hours with no obvious edits. Illustrations are shown in a corner of the screen, not full screen.
• Every episode of One Take follows this format, the camera running uninterrupted for 5 minutes.
• This entire music video, cover of a remix of the Ghostbusters song, is shot in one long sequence with the camera constantly moving. (There are maybe two cuts in it, but they're hidden really well.)

Western Animation

• Dora the Explorer:
  • The Season 1-2 opening consists of a single, consecutive shot of a pan through a live-action playroom, zooming into a computer, and showing the main characters participating in a CD-ROM arcade game.
  • The new intro introduced in Season 3 (which introduced the star catching gimmick) begins with a 30-second consecutive sequence of Dora and Boots swinging around the forest and meeting every supporting character introduced to that point, up until the line "You can lead the way!" which ends with them driving away in Tico's car.
  • An in-episode example occurs in "Quack Quack!"; the entire scene at Rainbow Bridge is done in one long take that lasts a whole minute and a half.
• Robot Chicken has one starring the title Robot Chicken fighting through the various characters that have appeared in the show in the style of The Protector (which is itself lampshaded).
• There is a very epic 21-second single shot in the third book finale of The Legend of Korra, tracking main villain Zaheer flying at top speed while Korra chases and attacks him with earth and firebending; in the middle of the shot he stops, the camera passes him and turns around to watch him attack Korra. It's one of the most visually incredible moments of the show.
• The 1931 short Bimbo's Initiation has a 40-second scene of Bimbo running while trying to dodge various deathtraps, where even the scenery is animated with him.
• Jay Jay the Jet Plane: "Something Special" gives us a single shot of Brenda reading the newspaper to Jay Jay and Tracy at the hangar and the former voicing his issue at wanting to be special, all in the span of at least two and a half minutes with no cuts.
• The opening of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is thirty seconds of action and wild camera rotations with zero cuts until the Title Card.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars used these on occasion, usually for epic fight scenes. One of the best examples was in "The Unknown", where we follow a terrified Clone Trooper medic aboard a Republic shuttle as the Super Battle droids kill everyone aboard and kidnap Tup. (The shot starts at 2:38 and runs for the rest of the video.)
• Most of the Sealab 2021 episode "Fusebox" is one long continuous shot of nothing but Sealab's exterior. It starts cutting more at the end when it's revealed to have all been a training video the crew was watching.
• Superjail! loves doing shots like this, especially during long continues scenes of inmates getting horribly murdered during sprawling orgies of violence and gore that usually top off almost every episode of the show.
• Lampshaded in the South Park episode "Butterballs"—the kids make an anti-bullying music video that goes all around the school; around 2:45 Butters messes it up, and Stan complains that since it's one long shot they have to start all over.
• The We Bare Bears short "The Cave" is entirely a shot of the exterior of the bears' house while they freak out about a bat getting into their home and trying to get rid of it. The only sign we see of the bears is Ice Bear rushing outside to get the hose when Grizzly starts a fire in the kitchen.
• Looney Tunes: The final scene of Rabbit Stew and Rabbits, Too! Quick Brown Fox is prepping his outdoor kitchen with a Rube Goldberg Device. No sooner is the final component set into place than Rapid Rabbit honks his pocket horn behind him. The Fox gets Hoist by His Own Petard in the process, finally landing on the tablecloth. The Rabbit blows a balloon which he then attaches to the corners of the cloth. As the Fox goes up in the air, the Rabbit gives off one last blast of his horn, after which he pulls out a carrot to munch on to close the cartoon out.
• The short film Screen Play is, true to its title, set up like a stage play, with the camera aimed squarely at the performance. It's not until the film's Downer Ending kicks off about nine minutes in that a new shot is introduced, to show the breaking of the performance by the samurai's arrival and subsequent killing spree.
• An episode of Family Guy had Peter walking around his house with a representative of the Emmys.
• BoJack Horseman had a season 2 episode do this as its entire cold opening.
• Solar Opposites: Discussed as an Offscreen Moment of Awesome in "The Sacred Non-Repeating Number". With arsenals of sci-fi weapons at the ready, Terry and Jesse and the other Shlorpian family charge at each other for possession of the Pupa, only for the scene to cut to an image of a sticky note saying, "Sydney— Please ask Hulu for an extra million $ so we can go over budget on a kick-ass action sequence! —Mike M." Terry then comments on the grandeur of the battle and the fact that it was done in one take.
  Terry: Jesus, shit. That was the craziest battle I've ever been in. And all in one unbroken take? That must have cost a million dollars!
• Smiling Friends: The entirety of "The Smiling Friends Go to Brazil!" is one long shot focused on the Smiling Friends left completely stranded inside of a Brazillian airport because Pim forgot to book a hotel room. The camera rests its position at the very end when they decide to fly back home as they walk out of frame.
• Skylanders Academy: The series finale has one continuous take when the team fights the Arkeyan Conquertron Kaos is piloting.
• The Patrick Star Show: "The Commode Episode" has two.
  • There's a consecutive 97-second shot when Patrick gets locked in the bathroom, and the rest of his family enters for various reasons, repeatedly cutting him off before he can explain that he needs help.
  • Later on, a shot of increasingly random people coming into the bathroom runs for 44 seconds.

---