And are TV shows filmed this way as well?
availability of actors / locations must be one thing.
If you have a lot of scenes at one location, might as well film every scene that is gonna be there, rather than leave and come back when the film returns to that scene.
Because you don’t have to set up in one location, move to a second location, then go back to the first, then go to the third, then back to the first. It reduces the need to schlep equipment around and thus keeps the budget lower.
In generally, TV will do this if at all possible. There’s far less time to get a TV episode done, so they will usually shoot all the scenes on one set, no matter where they go in the story.
Sitcoms that film before a live audience will just do the scenes as they appear. Since the audience is basically watching a play, doing it out of sequence would be confusing. But all sets in that case are usually in the same location.
This. It’s a heckuva lot cheaper, both in time and money, to do a single setup on a stage or location, then just have the actors change clothes as needed. And maybe move a few things around to indicate time passing.
Say the action cuts between two houses. Are you going to rent both of them at the same time and start shuttling your crew between the two? Of course not. First you’ll shoot all of the scenes that take place in one, then you move to the other and shoot all the scenes that take place there. Or say that you want to shoot a scene on a beach during sunset, but the beach you want is only available on a specific date. When that date comes, you’ll shoot the scene that takes place on the beach no matter where you are with the rest of the film. And so on.
Simple, grossly exaggerated example: Your film consists of a telephone conversation between someone on their cell phone in Central Park, NY, NY, and someone at the base of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France.
Do you really want to shoot thirty seconds in NY, fly to Paris, film 30 seconds there, fly back to NY … ?
Thanks all for the (in retrospect obvious) answer.
Or where they go in the season. NYPD Blue used to come to New York once or twice a year and shoot a season’s worth of exteriors in two weeks.
According to IMDb trivia, the 50s series Adventures of Superman was on such a tight budget that they would shoot all the scenes that took place in, for example, Perry White’s office for the season at one time.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of some movies shot in sequence though. Two questions.
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Why?
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And does it enhance anything?
Steven Spielberg shot E.T. completely in sequence. The entire movie really hinges on the performances of the child actors, and he knew it would be confusing for them (especially little Drew and the kid who played Elliot) if they shot scenes out of order, and thus impact their performance.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope was a technical experiment. Hitch wanted to shoot the film straight-through, with a minimum amount of breaks, as if it were a play with no intermission. If not for the limitations in camera technology at the time - no single camera film reel could hold enough film to shoot a feature-length film - he would have shot it straight-through from start to finish in one single take.
Thanks to digital recording, that limitation is effectively over and the film Russian Ark actually was shot straight-through, beginning to end, in one take. Even better, it literally had a cast of hundreds (if not thousands), with no CGI enhancement. It’s not well known in the states, but it really ought to be seen.
If you’re trying to very realistically depict gradual changes over time, such as deteriorating physical or emotional well-being, it can be helpful to your cast to shoot in sequence, so that they can allow their performance to change and develop without interruption.
Similarly, if you’re going to, for example, beat a car all to hell in a cross-country trip, it can save you a lot of money on extra cars.
E.R. did the same with location shoots in Chicago.
Also the use of minor actors (bit players & extras, mainly). While the main actors are contracted for specific amounts, these others are paid by the day. So if you have several crowd scenes where you need dozens of extras to make up the crowd, it saves a lot of money if you film all of those scenes in one day.
That “The rope” is based on long takes, that is scene=take more or less, is a known fact, but were the actual scenes of “The rope” shot in order?
P.S: btw the limitations in film camera technology havent much evolved in terms of film stock capacity for cameras. The difficulties encountered by “The rope” would be more or less the same today if you shot it on film.
I think in the odd tv facts thread someone mentioned that Lois always wore the same dress so they could cut more easily. If you think about it, all the leads pretty much had a set wardrobe.
I bet they could rig up something. Might be pretty cumbersome, but they could do it if they had a reason.
They could have rigged up something in Hitchcok’s time as well. Camera loaders have not expanded in size since mainly because the more capacity you had the more chances of film stock acting weird inside. Also, it would have added a tremendous bulk to the camera. Considering the mobility of the camera work in “The rope” it would have gone more against the concept than even breaking the long shots into more conventional-sized shots.
That said, I dont see how you could engineer a load capacity in 35 mm, equivalent to an hour and a half of straight filming even today. If that’s what you want to do, you should switch to a TV live recording straetegy, and do it on video. And guess what, those type of shows (theatrical play, with elaborate sets, shot live) existed at the time “The rope” was made. The options we have today were already there at the time.
Thank you. Leonard Nimoy ultimately spends 4 minutes talking about the 1950’s TV show Dragnet on YouTube here. Among other efficiencies, the actors would say their lines to off-screen teleprompters.
For a description of shooting a movie in sequence (and fascinating descriptions of 40 years of movies and live TV), an excellent book is Mary Astor’s A Life on Film, whose makeup is described here.
You’re completely overlooking digital, which can hold hours and hours of footage on a memory card the size of a postage stamp.