I’ve always been fascinated by the long take, and I guess now I’m trying to work out why. In one way, it could be considered the bridge between documentary and drama, the point at which fiction and non-fiction intersect in film, a fragment of reality.

French film critic and theorist Andre Bazin compares the long take to a suspect under police interrogation, where “if the camera is left running long enough, eventually reality will crack and surrender itself to the camera, and the camera can capture this reality accordingly”.

Some texts from which I have drawn inspiration include:

  – Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)

  – The thoughts and works of Andrei Tarkovsky

  – Wavelength  (Michael Snow, 2006)

  – Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)

  – Using the camera in ways other than just directing attention, I am interested in the different ways I can communicate more abstract things removed from the narrative, e.g: creating a meditative or hypnotic effect, creating a relationship between the viewer and the subject

  – I will be coordinating 3 – 5 different long takes: some strictly choreographed, others loosely (some with defined ideas of how to approach the environments that they are to be shot in, others not so much and prompted by this mystery)

  – Making use of different people and places (and/or both), possible candidates include Lara, my Mum, even strangers if that ends up being a possibility

  – Focusing on the differences between the takes, the ‘mistakes’ (in reference to the blood spattering incident during the filming of Cuaron’s Children of Men) – interacting with the idiosyncrasies of the environment and person(s).

  – Treating long takes as removed entities from film, pieces deserving of attention and spectacle in their own right, in ways that aren’t necessarily to be connected with other takes

  – Capturing the long takes multiple times in different ways to explore a sense of existentialism rather than as a device to construct meaning

– To me, I’ll be using all of this to become a better director, working to be as organised as possible on set so as to allow anything unplanned to fit into the filming

  – By that I mean I will need to be properly equipped to appropriately capture these takes. I need to prepare myself as well as I can to manipulate either a DSLR or another camera from uni properly to not miss anything.

I want to discover the best way, or at least explore the multitude of ways to communicate an idea, feeling, person or a place, without necessarily being attached totally to the conventions of film but rather with the possibilities of cinema as a medium of movement in mind. I am concerned with what there is, rather than why it is there.