One-take wonders: How this filming technique creates exceptional TV

The four-part English drama Adolescence, currently the most-watched show globally on Netflix with 24.3 million series views, has won almost universal praise for its unflinching approach to its difficult subject: the ripple effects of a violent murder committed by a teenage boy.

In particular, it has been lauded for the way it tells that story: each episode of the show, created by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, consists of a single take.

The technical difficulty of that is immense, especially in the second episode, in which two detectives visit the school where the victim, Katie, and her accused killer, Jamie (Owen Cooper), were students. More than 300 extras and about 50 crew had to be choreographed to allow the camera to follow the police as they move through the sprawling multi-level campus. In the final moments of the episode, the camera lifts off, flies a couple of hundred metres and then descends for a close-up of Eddie (Graham) as he visits the site of his son’s crime for the first time.

It is bravura filmmaking and, for many viewers, their first taste of one-shot storytelling.

Stephen Graham as chef Andy Jones in the feature film Boiling Point (2021), shot in a single take by director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis.Credit:

But this is a form that dates back almost 80 years. And among its previous proponents are the team behind Adolescence – Graham, director Philip Barantini and director of photography Matthew Lewis.

Barantini and Lewis first worked together on a short in 2016, in which the former acted. Lewis then shot Barantini’s first short as director, Seconds Out, in 2019, and the same year they were joined by Graham for Boiling Point, a 20-minute, single-shot film set in a restaurant kitchen.

In 2021 the three beefed that up to a feature of the same name, with the single take now stretching across 90 minutes of action as chef Andy Jones (Graham) comes undone during a frantic service.

The four-part series spun-off from that film (currently on SBS) abandoned the one-take approach, but Adolescence pushes it well beyond anything this tight-knit team has attempted before.

“The one-shot format does two fundamental things,” Thorne says. “It imposes a structure on the writing. You have … the unity of time, place, action forced upon you. The second is … it gives the actor the power.”

Typically, screen acting involves delivering short grabs of script – often just a single line – on cue, repeatedly, with big breaks between takes. Maintaining character is a challenge. The extended take allows the performer to inhabit that character without interruption.

As Erin Doherty, who plays the psychologist who visits Jamie in remand in episode three, puts it: ​​“The more you’re in a character’s skin, they just become a part of your soul. There’s a freedom that comes with the repetition we did.”

Of course, it also demands getting it right in one go.

Each episode took three weeks to pull together: a week for the actors to rehearse with Barantini and Thorne, a week for tech rehearsals, in which every movement was choreographed, and a week for the actual shoot. There was time for two takes per day, though sometimes a take was abandoned partway.

Episode three – in which Jamie is interviewed by the psychologist (Doherty) – was shot first, took 11 takes, and was captured on the final day. Episode four – in which Jamie’s family visits a hardware store (the handheld camera was slipped into a rig mounted on the front of the van for the journey, then dismounted upon arrival) – took 16. Episode two took 13, while episode one was captured on the second take, on day one.

Adolescence was only possible because the technology (lightweight cameras and rigs, high-powered drones) and the established modes of working for this creative team allow it. They create the space for exceptional performances to happen.

Farley Granger, James Stewart and John Dall in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).Credit:

But the first attempts at one-shot storytelling date back to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope. A drawing-room thriller based on a real-life murder, the movie was cut to look like a single take. In truth, that would have been impossible, as the cameras used held only 10 minutes of film. The film consisted of 10 segments. It wasn’t until the emergence of digital cameras that cinema-quality extended takes became feasible.

The earliest efforts were understandably formal: Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000), shot simultaneously with four cameras, was shown in a split-screen format, with overlapping plot lines and characters; Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) took us on a POV tour of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and simultaneously through centuries of Russian history (its 83 minutes were captured four times and featured a cast of more than 2000 people).

Russian Ark.Credit:

But soon the potential of marrying action and tension with the form became apparent. In PVC-1 (2007), Greek-Colombian director Spiros Stathoulopoulos created an 84-minute edge-of-the-seat thriller about a woman forced to wear an improvised explosive device, with a timer, around her neck.

The German film Victoria (2015) pushed its bank-heist plot past the two-hour mark. Writer-director Sebastian Schipper got the version he wanted on his third, and final, try.

All up, more than 50 features have been made using the single-take approach, with another dozen using edits but presenting as single-take films (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman and Sam Mendes’ World War I film 1917 being the most notable).

For some filmmakers, the one-shot is the ultimate challenge. And in the new comedy series The Studio, there’s a whole episode devoted to that.

Sarah Polley plays a director about to shoot the single-take finale of her film just as the sun is going down. There’s time for two takes at best. But studio head Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) causes absolute havoc when he visits set to witness a shot his offsider Sal (Ike Barinholtz) dismissively calls “the stupid magic-hour one-er”.

The entire episode is shot in a single, elaborately choreographed and very funny take.

It may be a rarity still, but when the one-shot can be put to both harrowing and hilarious ends, you know it’s having a moment.

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