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In an episode of Apple TV+’s “The Studio,” appropriately titled “The Oner,” studio chief Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) attends a shoot to watch the filming of a “oner,” a term used in production to refer to one, long uninterrupted take. To get him out of the way of the filmmakers, colleague Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), tries to urge him to leave the set, saying, “It’s just the director jacking off while making everyone else’s lives miserable. Audiences do not care.” But Remick is undeterred, praising the oner as the “ultimate cinematic achievement. It’s like the perfect marriage of artistry and technicality. … It’s also a great storytelling tool.”
The episode itself was shot as a oner, one of multiple episodic series this season to use this — others included Netflix’s “Adolescence” and Apple TV+’s “Severance.” Each are getting attention for their use of these meticulously choreographed dances that combine performance with the work of departments including camera, visual effects and production design.
“We really wanted to convey a sense of anxiety and tension and panic and also create something that felt very fluid and very real,” says Adam Newport-Berra, director of photography on “The Studio.” The episode involved four long takes filmed with an ARRI Alexa 35 camera, mostly handheld, as well as with a Ronin gimbal (for shots when Rogen and Barinholtz are in the car), that were “stitched” together in VFX.
The episode is built around the filming of a can’t-miss oner that the crew must capture in a tight 30-minute window as the sun is setting for the correct light. The episode was similarly shot at this time of day, at the “Silvertop” house in Silver Lake, designed by famed architect John Lautner.
“The whole conceit of the episode is that they’re losing light at sunset. We really had to wait for that moment, because that location was not conducive to faking lighting, because it’s all glass,” Newport-Berra explains. “So it’s really challenging to hide lights or to make it feel like magic hour when it’s not. We just decided to lean into it and shoot it at magic hour every day.”
He remembers, “We created these very rigorously choreographed shots, but the actors were always finding ways to improvise and to add nuance and flair to the performance.”
The team behind “Adolescence,” Stephen Graham’s drama surrounding a boy (Owen Cooper) who is charged with the murder of a classmate, similarly took this audacious approach, filming all four episodes of the Netflix limited series as oners.
“It’s like doing a play. [The actors] get into a head space that is really hard to achieve when you’re doing a section and starting again,” says DP Matthew Lewis. “I think you feel a depth of performance that you don’t feel necessarily when you [stitch takes] together.”
The takes were achieved following “loads of practice.” For filming, Lewis operated the camera alongside Lee David Brown, with numerous handoffs between the pair and the use of a range of camera support gear, including a gimbal, crane and drone. “We had 11 weeks for prep, and then for each episode, we had two weeks of rehearsals and a week to shoot. And we did that four times.”
For the boy’s home, the production used a house in South Kirkby, England, that required proximity to a studio (the police station was among the sets building on a soundstage) and locations that had appropriate driving distances from the house, such as a packaging warehouse that was redressed as a hardware store for the final episode.
Lewis asserts that each episode is one continuous take, though they did use select visual effects, for instance, in a scene when a child jumps out of a ground-floor window. For filming, the crew removed the window, and the camera was handed off to the next operator as the boy jumped. In post-production, the visual effects team completed the shot by adding a CG window with reflections, along with the glass breaking.
A very different approach was used for the kinetic opening sequence of “Severance” Season 2, during which Adam Scott’s Mark runs through a series of long empty halls at Lumen Industries. Industrial Light & Magic VFX supervisor Eric Leven related that after a previs was created, it was clear that the sequence, as envisioned, couldn’t be shot as a real oner — at least not on a TV budget.
Instead, they broke it down and stitched together 10 long takes, filmed in different ways so that it would leave even a keen viewer wondering how they did it.
Cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné says that “every part is a different approach and had a different challenge.” The sequence involved gear, including a gimbal, Steadicam and even a motion control system.
“There’s a part where the camera is moving with Adam down the hallway, but actually does a one-eighty around him,” Leven says of one complex part of the sequence. “So we put him on a treadmill on a green screen stage, and the camera sort of moved around him. The hallway that he ended up running down was completely computer generated.”
“For me, lighting [the sequence] was probably the trickiest,” Gagné adds. “We rebuilt a set of sky panels above the treadmill and basically had rolling light for movement.”
Director Ben Stiller “was really adamant that he didn’t want to do the sort of stitches that we’d seen in the past, where you do like, a column that wipes the frame,” Leven adds. “So, we tried to make stitches where you didn’t know where the stitches were. We tried to keep the audiences guessing.”
English (US) ·