One Shot Split Screen

It’s been a long while since the last update…

This year in my design class I’ve been given the task to create a one shot. For those of you unfamiliar with the term it is essentially what the name implies: one continuous long shot. The camera starts, action occurs, and the camera cuts, usually many minutes later. There are plenty of examples in cinema, and many films have tried to top each preceding film with the sheer complexity of their one-shots.

When I first read the script for 3x I was stuck by the possibility for the inclusion of such a thing. Not only that, since I was watching a lot of ReGenesis I also had the idea of doing lots of split screens. And since, afterall, we were trying to win a Charlie I thought what better way to show off than to not only have a split screen but a one shot split screen — two contiuous one shots that meet up at the end.

It was ambitious.

It was difficult.

It was beautiful.

It was cut.

Sort of.

The entire scene made it into the first cut of the film, which was viewed by a select few. However for timing purposes it was truncated for the final “awards” version.  While elements of it remain, a lot of the magic wore off since it no longer appeared to be TWO continuous 3 minute shots that matched up in the end.

But because of this project, and the numerous examples we’d been watching it got me thinking back to our one shot and I wanted to share it with some friends.

So here it is the complete sequence, the way it was in the original cut.

Enjoy.

TWO INTERESTING NOTES:

We knew from the get-go that we essentially had one shot (no pun intended) to do the scene. Robin had to burn a hole in her shirt, and cover it with blood. The first take had to be perfect or else we were screwed. We rehearsed the scene at least 8 times (in full, from start to finish) before we went ahead and shot it. However, believe it or not, we actually had to do a second take. Robin didn’t put enough blood on the shirt for it to be noticeable to the camera and as such we had to re-do the scene. Luckily for us, the hole she burnt was on a black stripe (which meant it was virtually unnoticeable) and since the camera couldn’t see the blood anyways we knew we could do the scene again without any issues. We did, and it went over flawlessly.

Also, this was one of the very first sequences I edited. After we wrapped our first weekend of shooting I immediately began capturing and editing scene together. Since not all the film was shot I had only a few select scenes to work with. The split screen was one of them and so it was among those first completed scenes which I showed to the cast/crew a week later. It is also one of the only scenes that by and large wasn’t changed from that very first version (the only difference then was the music played).

Please, sound off in the comments about what you think!