How to shoot invisibly edited "one take" Shots

[Melvin Harris]

Tried the whip stuff and it flopped, horrifically. People posted more pics and I'll try those. Again, I'll post when I've got something workable for you all to critique.

thanks to all

[Brian Drysdale]

Originally Posted by Matt Champagne

Believe it or not, Children of Men really is almost entirely one take.

Not entirely:

Children of Men: Invisible VFX for a Future in Decay | AWN | Animation World Network

[Cole McDonald]

I got the idea from watching some titling stuff done by arranging leaves and sand into words, then blowing them away with a leaf blower from a distance, the reversed footage then made the leaves and sand form the words.

Specifically, the thing that caught my in those instances was: If you need to end on any specific framing that's hard/impossible to get, start on the frame and move backwards, then reverse the shot in post. Used the technique in my feature at the end as well (still unwatchable as we had no clue what we were doing, but we learned alot from it, think I can re-edit to make it a passable 45 minutes) to end up as a super fast zoom into someone's XCU from a wide shot. I started in the final frame, then got pulled across the street in a wheelbarrow while zooming out to increase the speed of the zoom out and change some perspective with it... when reversed, the zoom in looked really dramatic.

And the luxury usually comes from that fact that I end up editing the footage too, so I can do whatever I need in camera/post to make the shot work :)

Originally Posted by Charles Papert

That's funny Cole, for all the whip pans I've done in my career, I've never had the "luxury" of reversing the second one (it's a great idea though--just don't think it's ever come up)! Might have to pitch that for an exceptional hard one. Nailing a whip-on is always a crap shoot. The other brutal one of those is the snap zoom into someone's face, where you have to reframe as you are zooming (unless their face happens to be in the center of the frame, rarely the case).