Odds & Ends

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Long Shots

If you had more respect for the idea of blogging than I do, you could really bemoan the influence that YouTube has had on the practice. It seems a lot of bloggers, exhausted by coming up with new content all the time, have been sinking back to what I do on this corner of my site all the time: just posting interesting YouTube videos. But there are times this trend to YouTube blogging is undeniably useful, as with this post on great long tracking shots, complete with many YouTube clips giving examples. These are the ultimate show-off shots (Jaime J. Weinman talks about their unobtrusive cousins, long uncut dialogue scenes) and it's fun to see so many in one place.

Some of the discussion on the post is interesting, and highlights the way technology has blurred the distinctions about what counts as a long take. It's always been the case that cuts might be "hidden" in a shot like this (typically through a whip-pan, object moving across the foreground, or a flash of light or darkness) but the means of doing this are becoming increasingly elaborate. In an old-school example like the opening shot of Touch of Evil or Robert Altman's send-up of it in The Player (clips of both are in the linked post) the virtuosity is in performance and on-set technical ingenuity. But in some of the more recent examples the digital assists in terms of hiding cuts and other cheats are quite involved, and the trickery is shared with the digital technicians who stitch everything together. A few of the commenters on that thread mention this shot from Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and it's a really good example of what I mean (the shot starts a little bit into the clip):

I'm not quite sure how many disguised cuts there are in that scene; there are a couple of obvious examples in the pull-outs from the car (where cuts are hidden with wipes from passing traffic), but then each shot itself is put together from so many elements that the very idea of what constitutes a "take" gets murky. For example, this was presumably shot with Cruise and the kids in a car on a greenscreen stage, and then blended with location shots of the freeway, but there are probably multiple disguised cuts in that location footage while the focus is on the car. And there are moments as the camera moves into the car where the shot in the car seems to shift as we pull in, so we effectively have a transition between shots in a small part of the frame while the "outer" shot remains unbroken.

Perhaps this takes the fun out of it, but it also opens up horizons: the War of the Worlds shot is extraordinary when you stop to think about it: this is a (seemingly) unbroken shot in which the camera circles a speeding car as it drives several miles down a freeway. We tend to get blase about this stuff these days, and perhaps the digital trickery has taken the fun out of such shots. But before you get too misty-eyed about the old-fashioned craftsmanship, take a look at Touch of Evil again. In addition to its two most famous long takes it also has a dialogue scene in which the camera is fixed to a moving car; taken together, they strongly resemble Spielberg's shot. Welles was a sucker for the most advanced techniques of his day, and he would have loved the tools filmmakers have today.

Labels: close analysis, long shots, spielberg