Will this type of filmmaking bore modern audiences?

I

ironpony

Carbonite Member
I am practicing towards making my first feature film. Am doing my second short film now, and still working up. I wanna practice how I want to make a feature, and have a couple of scripts to choose from.

I was thinking of shooting it like you see in a movie from the 30s to 50s, where a large portion of the scene is shot all in one take. However will modern audiences get bored with that if the are so use to constant cutting? I want to create my style, but at the same time not create a reason for why my movie could not hold people's attention. I want to do a thriller with a script that is not slow paced and gets to the point but do audiences still need quick cutting, even so?
 
Well if you'd told me a couple of years ago that B&W silent movie would win an Oscar, I wouldn't of believed it.
I think people will accept a slower pace, if it's right for the story.
 
It's film, it either works or it doesn't - there really isn't a 'right' or 'wrong' as such.

I finally got round to watching The Ten Commandments last night, and although the sweep and spectacle of the film is still truly impressive, the pacing and 3.5 hour runtime made it a real struggle to get through.

So I think longer shots can work, but they do need to be dynamic, both visually and in terms of performance.
 
If you're practicing, does it matter? Make the film according to the method you want and make it as well as you can. Then with your next project you can come back towards the middle ground while retaining the influence of your experimental project. Keep what worked, reject what didn't and mix what's left with traditional or contemporary trends. Kind of like how experimental rock bands always start off really out there and come closer to the mainstream with each passing album. Usually around about the third or fourth album they strike their best balance between their fresh experimental sound and mainstream listenability, before becoming just another mainstream band (usually with a trail of copycats by this stage already diluting their sound).
 
ironpony said:
I was thinking of shooting it like you see in a movie from the 30s to 50s, where a large portion of the scene is shot all in one take. However will modern audiences get bored with that if the are so use to constant cutting?
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I can still be enthralled by films like Rope. I don't think you're going to get mass acceptance by the teen-35 crowd, but then again, they haven no taste anyway. Make the short you want to be entertained by, now how many X number of people you think it will appeal to. Shorts are where this kind of form should be experimented with.

And, as a side note, black is a really poor choice for text color on here.
 
Woody Allen uses long takes where the action is blocked for camera as opposed to cut and he's pretty popular ;) I think it depends on the story. If it's an action thriller, I think you may not serve the story but if it's, for instance, a comedy and you want to see > 1 character in frame for reactions and physicality then I think it's a good strategy. I would choose how to shoot it based on the story, or the scene and let your style define itself. Form follows function, and all.
 
I'll play devil's advocate. If you're stuck in a long ass shot, a hell of a lot better happen on screen. Watch the opening 6 minute shot from The Player. Tell me how much happens during that take. That is a screenwriting achievement. Same with the opening of Touch of Evil, how much information is the audience receiving, and from how many different vectors?

A lot of indie films fail because they don't have enough going on to sustain 100 minutes of attention. They drag, and they lose people who are pretty savvy about predicting the future of the plot. Compare to something like Pulp Fiction, where not only can't you predict the plot, you can barely figure out what point in time everything's happing in relation to everything else. Point is: There's a hell of a lot going on.

Take any 15 minutes from True Blood, and there's more twisting and going on than in most sophomoric indie feature films. The audience wants more -- "one louder."
 
mail4joeg said:
I'll play devil's advocate. If you're stuck in a long ass shot, a hell of a lot better happen on screen.
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I agree - I think, or could suggest, that filming is about communicating, so IMO you need to communicate all the time

Now a long shot may be communicating all the time, either because a lot happens (or doesnt)

I would stick to the general concept to communicate (load information into) your audience

There are of course a bunch of long shots that do exactly that ... and many that dont

S
 
I say go for it!

You define it Mr Visionary! Reactive film-making sucks - making things based on what the audience wants gets boring.

very boring...

Dont hesitate - you can always sell out to audiences later.
 
Okay thanks. I know what you mean by a lot of indie films not having enough for 100 minutes. I wrote a thriller that I am trying to get down to 100 minutes around, but there is a lot of plot to cram in. This is the script I will most likely want to do as my first feature, if I cannot find anything better in the mean time. But I wrote it with as much plot as I could possibly fit in without it becoming too illogical. So hopefully with a fast pace like The Dark Knight for example, the long shots will go by quick enough and stay to the point for most audiences. I want to be appeal to crowds in general, and not have to cut out people under 35 though.
 
Long takes are a wonderful thing if you can pull them off. I think the key to having an audience go for a long take is to either make the shot beautiful or the action really interesting.
 
That's another thing. On my microbudget I won't have sets, so I will have to use real locations, and in real locations, the art direction is really not the same. I was told by my peers that in my previous movies, the art direction looks realistic, but audiences don't buy into realistic art direction, and are use to accepting the more extravagant kind instead. I would have to use post effects to perhaps change a bit of the art direction.

As far as action goes, most of the long shots I have in mind are dialogue scenes really. The dialogue reveals plot twists and turns, and I'll cut to certain close ups when emotionally appropriate of course, if that works.
 
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Well of course you can achieve the same effects of cutting just in a long take. The technique is called staging. You can make the staging intense enough so that nobody even realizes that it's one take. The difficulty though is not just in the design, but in the performance. The longer the take is, the more actors involved, and the more complicated it is, the bigger the chance is that someone will make a mistake - move in the wrong way, or flub a line, or a camera error, or whatever... all it takes is one and the take is ruined. I was once on a shoot where the take was almost 4 minutes long, and it had to be repeated 20 times and there still wasn't a good take - so it rolled onto the next day shooting for another 17 takes before we got a good one. That worked out to 4 minutes of material for 2 full days of shooting... not exactly efficient on a small low-budget indie production. Bottom line, boredom of the audience is not a factor - AT ALL, because you can get almost all effects of cutting just from staging alone; the problem you're going to have is that long takes require everybody to be on their top game - full on pros... not something that a newbie is likely to be very successful with. But rock on anyhow if you've got the means!
 
Watch some of Tim West's recent films, there aren't a lot of fast cuts at all, and he's brought back some style that was used in many older thriller/suspense films. He even uses some good old zooms which makes me want to try some of that on a master shot.

Look for: The Inkeepers & The House of the Devil.
 
Possibly the most boring, but well shot film ever is ...The Man from London, there's a scene of a man drinking a whole bowl of soup that goes on for ten minutes. At a film festival showing, 3/4 of the audience walked out in the first 15 min. The rest were asleep or dead!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GATq3wZmFl0

imdn user comment: The Man from London proceeds not at the speed of hell freezing over. More like a hell frozen over long ago and never to thaw. Ever. A place from which there is no escape. A god-forsaken wasteland.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0415127/

It makes The Ten Commandments look like a Michael Bay movie!
 
Haven't seen that one but I want to see The Innkeepers a lot from what I've heard. I too want to bring back that old style but in a low budget action thriller. But there are scenes with quick cutting too and more close ups too. It really depends on the scene, but quite a few I want to do old style like that. Hopefully audiences will like it. Basically I want to do something atypical and not have to storyboard my whole thriller based on copies of what I see in most thrillers nowadays, just because everyone else is doing it. But at the same time, I want to make a successful movie, that would be considered good enough to get distribution as well.
 
I think it is important for story to come before style

While there are various current looks, (hand held OTS being one) it is so important just to be an efficient story teller and make the audience understand clearly and quickly

a lot of conventions in photographer and movies, are not about fashion but about passing information, expression with tights and orientation with wides

It is also worth remembering that a lot of 'style' comes from the filmmaking process - for example a lot of 1950s cinematographers would I guess have loved to use a steadicam.. but it did not exist

Also todays makers on a budget would love huge crane shots and 50k of outdoor HMI - but just cant have them - so that affects how they would tell the story

as for making a feature I wonder.. have you made a 12min film or suchlike - it is critical to do this first

S
 
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