A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Long Shot Sequence

One of my absolute favorite filmmaking techniques is the long shot: A scene where the camera doesn’t cut away for minutes at a time. The movies Gravity and Children of Men have amazing long shots, as does Goodfellas (there are many others too).

As fascinated as I am by these scenes, I’ve never seen exactly how they’re made…until now. Thanks to the heads up from the website Slashfilm, I learned about a behind-the-scenes video showing in splitscreen format how a long shot was filmed in the show Kidding.

It’s only 2 minutes long, and I would highly recommend checking it out. The most fascinating thing to me about it–something I’d never considered–is the use of body doubles to make it seem like you’re looking at a particular actor, but you’re not really. That gives the actor some flexibility to almost be in two places at once.

I keep watching the video as I write this…it’s just incredible what they’ve achieved here. Check it out:

What stood out the most to you about the methods they used to pull this off?

11 thoughts on “A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Long Shot Sequence”

  1. Thanks for sharing Jamey, that was really awesome! I’m impressed by the way they managed to create such a long shot in such a small environment. The Children of Men remains the holy grail for me but as Josh mentioned, True Detective had a really great one too as did Oldboy with the hallway fight scene.

    Reply
    • You know, I’ve seen that movie a number of times–it’s one of my favorites–but I can’t think of a long shot in it. Which scene is that?

      Reply

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