There's a Reason More TV Shows Are Using Long Takes

Some ambitious shots have become part of cinematic history. Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil begins with a lengthy tracking shot that establishes the film’s setting, characters and conflict. Decades later, Robert Altman opened The Player with a long tracking shot as an homage of sorts to Welles’s film, complete with a reference to it in the dialogue. The new Apple TV+ series The Studio includes a character named in homage to Altman’s film — and wouldn’t you know it, it also features some ambitious camerawork, including an episode titled “The Oner” structured as a single take.

The Studio isn’t the only series in the spotlight right now where ambitious filmmaking choices were made. Each of the four episodes of Netflix’s miniseries Adolescensce was filmed in a single shot; given that the first episode includes multiple locations, the logistics of pulling this off can’t have been easy. But it certainly seems like expansive single-take projects are a little easier to find nowadays, and much of that has to do with the cameras being used behind the scenes.

IndieWire’s Sarah Shachat recently interviewed Adolescence‘s director of photography, Matthew Lewis, who provided more details on how the series was made. Lewis told IndieWire that, compared to even five years ago, cameras have become much lighter, which can made things much easier for camera operators and production crew members tasked with getting the shot right.

Lewis used the DJI Ronin 4D, a digital camera that’s also been used on feature films like Civil War and Flight Risk. “The size of the camera package meant that we could do moves that we couldn’t have done before,” Lewis told IndieWire — and also pointed to a similar trend regarding lighter lenses as making things even easier for ambitious shots.

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Ambitious shots can be thrilling to watch; consider the Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas, to cite one memorable example. But that isn’t simply a cool shot for the sake of being a cool shot; it also makes the seductiveness of organized crime that much more tangible. Similarly, Adolescence is also about the connections between its characters; the meticulously-arranged camera work helps to accentuate that. It’s great to hear that film crews have more options available to them — but the story being told remains vitally important.