Long Take Experience

I had a really good experience with the long-take project. I have shot with the Bolex before, but I was really surprised at how well our footage came out. Overall, there were two really cool things I experienced while shooting this project. For one, I had never before tinkered with the idea of shooting a long-take film with the intent of having it “double” back on itself. We opted to shoot at 24 frames per second, and had some difficulty brainstorming an idea for this situation. A couple ideas seemed cool in theory, but most didn’t hold water when we really thought about how it would work in a forwards/backwards format. So when I really started thinking about it, I realized the coolest thing would be if we started with something ambiguous, and by the end of the long-take that ambiguity would be sort of “explained.” The last 30 seconds is when the film would begin to double back on itself and the original ambiguous backwards action would be played in its natural order.

When it came time to block the shot, we spent a lot of time making sure the backwards actions we filmed would look natural when played forwards. We took special notice of facial expressions, beginning and ending movements of certain actions, and pacing. After running through the shot about 5 or 6 times, we had it timed perfectly. We shot the damn thing without a hitch, and it ended up looking a lot better than I expected. It was really cool to approach a project like this from a different perspective: backwards.