It’s funny - I am the most oblivious movie watcher ever, apparently, because I never realized that Goodfellas scene was a long take (never even heard the term, actually). But reading this thread, there are several scenes mentioned that stood out to me in movies (Goodfellas, the scene from Boogie Nights, Children of Men)…and now I know why they were so memorable. Cool!
You don’t have to care. I just thought it was something people generally know by osmosis, just like I know rather too much about various forms of football, even though I think it’s a wretched waste of energy.
It occurs to me that my initial comment may have been construed as meaning “People who don’t know about making movies are stupid” when what I actually meant was “I have to learn that not everyone knows the same stuff I do”.
I apologise for any upset I may have caused by my poorly chosen wording.
When I was in acting school we called that type of shot a “moving master”. One of our projects was a ~20 minute short all done in a single moving master shot. My group’s short featured a teenaged girl walking around a spooky orphanage at night, running into what are presumably the ghosts of people who died horribly there in years past. Most of us were only in one or two parts of it, so there was a lot of waiting around.
My “scene” in this was very simple. I was an altar boy with bloody jagged chunks of wood protruding from my chest, and there was a priest in a chair who had had his belly cut open with his guts hanging out. While chanting some latin-sounding gibberish, I hold a chalice full of blood up to the priest’s lips for him to drink, then I drink. Then I turn to the girl, and, emphatically spouting more latin-sounding gibberish, offer the chalice to her. She screams and runs out of the room only to stumble across the next grotesque tableau. Happily, chocolate syrup can pass for blood when you’re shooting in black and white. Unhappily, the priest’s fake guts were made of real liver from the discount butcher a few blocks away (in a decidedly scuzzy part of town). Discount liver goes rancid very quickly when someone keeps it on their lap on a hot summer afternoon.
Before the third and final take, the director and cameraman come into our room giggling like idiots with new instructions. Rather than offer the chalice, I was to grab a piece of the priest’s guts and offer that to the girl instead. Our star was not informed of this change. After the director calls action we patiently wait twelve or so minutes until it’s time for our scene. Everything goes as planned, and our star doesn’t break character when I surprise her by waving rotten liver in her face. Then I have to stand around for about five minutes with a chunk of rotten liver in hand as we get ready for the final segment where all the ghosts reappear and close in on the girl at once. When and only when our director finally calls cut does our star bolt for the bathrooms to vomit. She says that prank very nearly made her blow the take.
This was the film I came in to mention as the one with the most impressive all in one take scenes (although the blood spatter on the camera was simultaneously realism enhancing and fourth wall breaking if such a thing is possible).
Of course, note that:
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Some films (or TV episodes like the X-files ‘continuous take’ episode in the Bermuda Triangle) will do do tricks like pan across a dark or bland object to make it seem like the take is longer than it actually is…
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Although the final shot is continuous, it may of course take a good amount of rehearsal and a few takes to get it right.
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Many shoots (I know it’s true with the Children of Men car scene) will cheat slightly with CGI - in the COM case, the actual car was open air and they filled in the walls of it with CGI to allow for camera movement.
And here is a very clever (and absolutely joyous) amateur one-take music video made by students in Québec with a hand-held camera. I love this video.
In that case I must post this one, which was posted on SMDB late last year. There’s a twist to it which will become quickly apparent, which plays well with another thread on the board right now.
That was pretty impressive (and charming, too). 
Not true. I just watched the behind the scenes. The roof of the car was missing and filled in with CGI, but all the sides, windows, seats and actors were real. It was mounted on a specially built rig that was driving down the road (drivers at both ends for both forward and reverse) with this huge camera rig above. To get the camera in position, the front seats had to occasionally lean forward or back. The only non-real effect outside the car was the motorcycle crash. The bike and riders were real, but they were replaced for the crash, which was shot separately - too much risk to the stars.
Nit duly picked.
Eyeglasses Catch had me miffed.
Until I saw how they did it.
Cute, but I think that belongs in this thread, not this one. 
There was a very long shot at the beginning of an episode of *Scrubs *of the main characters arriving at work. It was probably a couple of minutes long, and Donald Faison had to make a long basketball shot in the middle of it. And the director wanted it to be a swish. No pressure there! 
They discussed it in the commentary.
There is a pretty impressive continuous shot in Murder in the First (a pretty underrated film if you ask me), in which Christian Slater’s character (a lawyer) is visiting Kevin Bacon’s character (an accused murderer/Alcatraz inmate) in a holding cell. The scene follows Christian Slater down a corridor, greeting a guard, signing in, entering big room with a cage in it, entering the cage and trying to engage a catatonic Keven Bacon in conversation.
The impressive part is how the camera follows him into the room and circles the cage as the scene unfolds. As the camera rotates around the cage, it is alternately inside and outside of it. The set/cage looks pretty damned solid, but it seems that the corners could be opened (for lack of a better term) to allow the camera free movement. Not to mention that while the camera had to start off as a carried steadi-cam, it ended up on crane looking down at the cage from above.
I’m not sure how long the scene is, but it’s at least a minute or two … maybe longer.
The first use of the steadicam I recall was in Hal Ashby’s first-rate Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory. It contained an amazing tracking shot of Guthrie in a migrant workers’ camp. You can see the shot here, and the site indicates this was in fact the very first use of the steadicam in a feature film.
No surprise the man behind the camera on that film was the amazing Haskell Wexler. I see he won the Oscar that year for best cinematography.
The opening shot of the American remake of “La Cage Aux Folle”, “The Birdcage” (1996), is, what I guess would be described as, a fake amazing tracking shot. It starts out over the open ocean and flies toward land, finally arriving at a street along the shore. The camera then continues to move down to street level and through an open door and into a nightclub.
I was impressed with the notion of a helicopter being able to make it through an open door the first time I saw the shot. A subsequent viewing revealed a masterful lap dissolve between the two pieces of film. It’s very well done and worth a look if you’re interested in this kind of thing.