Watched **Goodfellas **last night. There is a scene where Ray Liotta takes Lorraine Bracco to a restaurant called The Copacabana. The scene shows them getting out of the car, entering the restaurant through a backdoor (including walking down a flight of steps), walking through the busy kitchen, sitting at a table, and then watching Henny Youngman do a routine on stage.
The entire scene is completely unbroken. I was so amazed that I backed it up and watched it three times. (My wife was not happy at me doing this. LOL.) While walking through the restaurant the workers are talking to Liotta, walking around him, etc. There is one shot in the kitchen where they narrowly miss a guy carrying an orange milk crate.
I don’t know how long the scene is. It’s at least three minutes.
How did they film this scene? Was it just a guy carrying a video camera walking behind them? If so, why is the camera not bouncing around while he walks? I was thinking the cameraman might have been on some kind of wheeled-cart. But how could he have gone down the flight of steps?
Steadicam. The Wiki article references the Goodfellas shot.
They use them a lot. There is a scene in Pulp Fiction which follows Butch getting out of his car. skirting a few yards, climbing through a chain link fence, crossing a street and walking up a flight of stairs in one unbroken shot.
I love shots like that. They are an old tradition (starting, I believe, with Touch of Evil), but have certainly become more common since the Steadicam.
Other notable examples: Snake Eyes, Children of Men, and an entire movie of one shot: Hitchock’s Rope. Hmmm, come to think of it, **Rope **is even older than Touch of Evil! But it felt more like a gimmick.
Though it’s meant to emulate one long shot, Rope is actually made of multiple shots. The film Russian Ark however, is one long feature-length shot (made possible by video).
I don’t look at it as a ‘gimmick’, but as an ‘experiment’. I thought it was pulled off very well. I liked it because I knew it was an experiment and I could see how it was put together.
Of course it wasn’t done in one shot. (You know that. Just saying.) Multiple takes, lighting setups, etc. And the magazines only hold 11 minutes of film. I appreciate the planning it took make the film.
The movie Timecode is 4 continuous 90+ minute takes shown simultaneously. They actually made 15 such takes with the video and theatrical versions including different ones.
Clearly the technology at the time didn’t allow a feature-length single shot, but I meant that it was *presented *as a single, continuous shot to the audience, and was intended to be perceived as such. Hence the “back of the jacket” and other all-black scenes to cover the transitions.
Atonement had a scene like that. A scene during the War when a troop of soldiers approach a former beach-town resort area (Dunkirk) where many more troops are camped out, waiting…
The camera walks in with them so you get their point of view as the camera moves through various scenes of guys relaxing, horsing around, singing, drinking, etc. as the camera sweeps the beach with ferris wheel and such in the background. It lasts for several minutes and was one, continuous shot. On the DVD there is an “extras” section where they show how it was filmed. A MUST SEE.
Another of my favorite long tracking shots, done well before Steadicams were around, is this one from I Am Cuba… absolutely jaw-dropping. (Sadly, this youtube version doesn’t have the correct soundtrack for some reason, but it’s still absolutely amazing to watch).
Beyond the simple fact that the camera operator was using a Steadicam, the actual shot was pulled off with a substantial amount of planning and a lot of assistant directors and production assistants.
My favorite example of this sort of shot is the opening of Boogie Nights. Here’s the clip. WARNING! Turn sound off before playing (awful YouTube automatically replaced audio).
It opens on a full screen shot of a marquee display of the title of the film. Then it tilts to show the name of the theater (aka a “Dutch shot”), straightens out and pans left. It continues to pan, following a car driving down the street. The camera walks down the street (the operator must have started out standing on a crane) to come up behind the car which has stopped in front of a night club. The camera closes in on the owner of the club, and tracks around him, walking backwards into the entrance of the club, as he greets the passengers of the car. They walk down a dark hallway and past the camera, who is now following the club owner and his guests onto the dance floor. The guests order drinks and sit down and the camera follows the club owner through the dancer as he greets others, circling him and various guests on the dance floor. The camera leaves the club owner and returns to the folks from the car, sitting at a booth. They are greeted by a character on roller skates, and the camera follows her back onto the dance floor until finally ending on a close up of another character.
3 minutes of smooth camera movement, perfectly choreographed, that introduces all the major characters and their relationships with each other.
I love the opening shot from Boogie Nights. It opens on a marquee, moves over a street into a nightclub where we catch our first glimpse of most of the main cast. Apparently PT Anderson was inspired by the long tracking shot in I Am Cuba (he cites this on the DVD commentary IIRC).
Clips of I Am Cuba and other great tracking shots (including Goodfellas) can be found at this link.
Because everyone is born with this knowledge in their head?
The long unbroken shot predates Touch of Evil (I’m thinking that Fritz Lang may have been the initiator) but that scene is one of the most memorable. The shot in Goodfellas pays homage to that tradition, and was indeed done via Steadicam, which revolutionized the way movies could be shot without requiring a lot of track-and-trolley work to perform intricate tracking shots. One of the first films to use Steadicam extensively, however, was Kubricks’ The Shining (think of the camera following Tommy riding his tricycle round and round).
It was shot with the “Fig Rig”, 24" metal ring with a brace for the camera welded in the middle. The idea was to center the lens in the middle of the circle and “drive” it.