Alfonso Cuaron's new film ("Gravity") to feature 17 minute opening long take

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refocusedmedia

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Alfonso Cuaron's new film ("Gravity") to feature 17 minute opening long take

http://thefilmstage.com/news/averag...ty-revealed-17-minute-opening-take-confirmed/


Additionally, it will have an ASL (average shot length) for 45 seconds... or 39 seconds if you factor out the opening shot. And it will have multiple takes lasting 3-7 minutes.


This has been one of my most anticipated films for over a year now, and tidbits like this just get me even more excited.
 
Spoilers below


I read that in Children of Men the final battle scene with the very long take where that fella goes inside the building in the midst of the battle to find the baby was actually a carefully edited combination of 3 different shots and not one long take as it appeared to be
 
Saharanturtle said:
Spoilers below


I read that in Children of Men the final battle scene with the very long take where that fella goes inside the building in the midst of the battle to find the baby was actually a carefully edited combination of 3 different shots and not one long take as it appeared to be
Click to expand...

The end sequence is a single take from the moment they go down the dark alley into the middle of the uprising, up until he finds the girl and the baby upstairs. They did the whole take multiple times, and ended up going with the last take of the day I beleve. There's well-founded speculation that there's a seamless cut when he actually enters the building (the entry is very dark, would be easy to splice to shots there), and they certainly might have, but the only long take in CoM that was confirmed to be an amalgamation of multiple, separate shots is the car ambush sequence. At least, that I've ever read or seen.
 
Wikipedia:

The commonly reported statement that the action scenes are continuous shots[SUP][62][/SUP] is not entirely true. Visual effects supervisor Frazer Churchill explains that the effects team had to "combine several takes to create impossibly long shots", where their job was to "create the illusion of a continuous camera move." Once the team was able to create a "seamless blend", they would move on to the next shot. These techniques were important for three continuous shots: the coffee shop explosion in the opening shot, the car ambush, and the battlefield scene. The coffee shop scene was composed of "two different takes shot over two consecutive days"; the car ambush was shot in "six sections and at four different locations over one week and required five seamless digital transitions"; and the battlefield scene "was captured in five separate takes over two locations". Churchill and the Double Negative team created over 160 of these types of effects for the film.[SUP][63][/SUP] In an interview with Variety, Cuarón acknowledged this nature of the "single-shot" action sequences: "Maybe I'm spilling a big secret, but sometimes it's more than what it looks like. The important thing is how you blend everything and how you keep the perception of a fluid choreography through all of these different pieces."[SUP][[/SUP]
 
The source they quote for that, refers to the end sequence as "9 minutes" long. There is a single, unbroken 6+ minute take within that 9 minutes. The last 3ish minutes has many obvious cuts, just like any film. I was referring to the 6+ minute long take in my comments above. They may have used elements from additional takes, but the point remains.

Also, it says the car ambush scene is 9 minutes long, when it is barely over 4 minutes. Odd.
 
it doesn't say where Frazer Churchill's quote comes from, but I did see a comment on youtube from a guy that says he worked at DNeg, he also said the battle scene was five shots. If the claims of ref 62 are false the nine minute error is kind of irrelevant.
 
Interesting, especially considering ref 61 talks about the single, unbroken shot at length. Also, there was an interview I saw with the camera operator who spoke about how they ended up "using the last take of the day".
 
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