Experience: Long-take Sequence

I had a lot of fun filming the long-take shoot. The long-take is basically just what it says: a single, uncut shot. Ours had to last exactly one minute so we came up with a concept where a news anchor interviews a witness of a monster sighting. After having filmed the rhythmic editing sequence, we all had a better knowledge of how to use the bolex. This made things run much more smoothly. In our scene, the interview goes wrong when the witness leads the anchor into the woods where he saw the monster. The monster reveals itself and then the footage ends. In order to get the timing of this sequence exactly right we did multiple run-throughs using a stopwatch. This allowed us to get all of our movements, pacing, and framing exactly how we wanted it and still within the rules of the assignment. We used an iphone to record the sound during our shoot so that we could easily add dialogue in post. We did, however, encounter a problem when processing the film. After opening the camera up we discovered that our film was bunched up inside the bolex. We were worried for a little bit that our film would suffer because of this malfunction. However, after dunking the film in the chemicals and drying it off, we realized that the images turned out fine. It was very exciting to see the film play on the projector because it was the first time that I had scene what I had shot on actual film. The blacks and whites were inverted but this was a detail we had to switch in final cut. I think our group worked very smoothly. We were well prepared for this project and understood each of our roles. We were always either right on time or ahead of schedule; therefore, the entire long-take process (from filming to conversion to digital) went very smooth.