Journal Article

1917: The ‘Hard Work’ of the Digital Long Take

Totaro, Donato

2022

Overview

The combination of cinematography Roger Deakins (and his team of assistants, grips, etc.), director Sam Mendes and the art and set design crews designed the film to move in what some industry insiders refer to as “oners”: continuous long takes that either do not conclude with an edit; or are stitched together in one of many ways, digitally edited or through what I call “mise-en-trickery”, which is when the edit is hidden within the details of the shot, like a dark coat, a black space, a piece of furniture, a character walking past the camera, or within a whip pan, to suggest the illusion of a single shot. Since the gradual shift to digital filmmaking from around 2010 onwards there has been a marked increase in these type of films, largely due to how digital technology facilitates extreme long takes from a technical standpoint. [...]the single take real time narrative has become a common aesthetic choice for low budget filmmakers, which may seem counter-intuitive when you factor in how much time (which often translates to money in filmmaking) preparation, planning and mapping out is involved in sustaining the long take. In the above mentioned scene where Schofield wakes up from his black out (67 minutes), the camera is on a Trinity rig to film Schofield’s face from close up overhead, but when he gets up and walks up a set of stairs to the top floor, where we see the church yard lit by flares through a window, there is a blend which disguises a practical switch of the camera to a 50 foot Technocrane, which had to be accommodated by knocking out the back part of the set. The length of the Technocrane enabled the camera to move beyond the windows (which were specially built to part open to allow for the camera).

• Publisher: Donald Totaro
• Subject: Actors / Digital cameras / Digital technology / Mendes, Sam / Motion picture directors & producers / Real time / Screen time