It used to be that a “one shot,” or “oner,” was only associated with movies.
But the combination of prestige television and advanced technology has made it more common for the small screen to showcase the ballet of direction, cinematography, acting and more required to make it feel like an episode or scene is filmed in one continuous take.
The shootout gone awry in the first season of HBO’s “True Detective” garnered Emmys for cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and director Cary Joji Fukunaga and is still talked about in cinephile circles with a hushed reverence. The technique is also what made the long-winded “walk-and-talk” scenes of NBC’s “The West Wing” so memorable, and what kept the adrenaline flowing for “Review,” the Season 1 episode of Hulu’s “The Bear” that garnered Emmys for director Christopher Storer and the show’s sound mixing and editing team members.
This season, though, Emmy contenders are taking it up a notch. Oners are omnipresent, used for grueling fight scenes (HBO’s “House of the Dragon” and Disney+’s “Daredevil: Born Again”); trippy mind warps (Apple TV+’s “Severance”); documentary-style realism (Max’s “The Pitt”) and brutal examinations of crime and its repercussions (Netflix’s “Adolescence” and “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”). In comedies, Apple TV+’s “The Studio” is filled with oners, including an episode-length example about a film production’s quest to achieve a perfect one shot at sunset. (The episode is, of course, called “The Oner.”)
“We call it a dance with the actors,” “The Pitt’s” director of photography, Johanna Coelho, says of the series’ immersive style. “We have two camera operators, and they both really learn to know how the actors move. But the actors learn to see how they move with the camera.”
The series’ camera crew is in the actors’ faces so much that they have to wear medical scrubs, lest they get caught in a background shot. And Coelho says production designer Nina Ruscio tested about 50 shades of white paint for the set’s hospital walls to find one that would balance everyone’s skin tones because the scenes flow so automatically into each other that the lighting couldn’t always be adjusted.
The increasing use of oners also reflects rapid technological transformation. “Adolescence” director Philip Barantini says he would have struggled to film his four-part limited series in episode-length one shots as recently as three years ago. The crew shot with a Ronin 4D, an affordable and lightweight camera that could easily be handed to different operators. (Director of photography Matt Lewis became such a fan that he bought one for himself.)
The key to using the oner successfully — and avoiding accusations of gimmickry — is to ensure the style doesn’t outshine the story, says Barantini, who also used the technique for his restaurant drama “Boiling Point.” Indeed, though the oner is frequently associated with a fast pace, it also can slow things down, making it hard for audiences to look away. For instance, “The Hurt Man,” the fifth episode of “Monsters,” is the shortest of the season at just 36 minutes. But director Michael Uppendahl uses that entire time to zoom methodically in on actor Cooper Koch’s Erik Menendez as he details horrifying stories about his family.
Working with showrunners Ian Brennan, who wrote the episode, and Ryan Murphy, as well as cinematographer Jason McCormick, Uppendahl brought in a large crane that could push the camera in so slowly that audiences wouldn’t immediately notice. It also could tilt the camera and recalibrate if speed or sound were off.
“It does take a certain kind of actor to be able to maintain that kind of stillness without constricting performance,” Uppendahl says of Koch, adding, “He’s a young performer, and I didn’t know if he was able to do that.”
They got the scene in 10 takes.
“The Studio” co-creator Evan Goldberg, who also co-directed every episode with series star Seth Rogen, notes the technique dictates that the plot can follow only a single storyline. Once they decided to film episodes this way, he says, “We had to rewrite every single scene of every single episode to accommodate it.
“We knew we were going to film it that way before we wrote it,” Goldberg explains. “But then once we hit the ground on production and actually looked at the scripts, we realized that we had to make the jokes end when they leave a room and … if there’s someone upstairs and downstairs yelling at each other, are we actually gonna be able to do that?”
A filming error also means a much bigger scene reset than a normal shot.
“Daredevil” director Aaron Moorhead has what he calls the Filmmaker’s Prayer: “May the camera, the script and the actors all want to do the same thing. Amen.”
Moorhead and directing partner Justin Benson filmed three episodes of the action drama’s first season, including the premiere episode, which features a oner of a fight scene down a narrow hallway. This helped establish the camera’s language for the show and how it would move. He says it’s “not exactly harder” to film a oner; “it’s just a very different skill set.”
“Almost every time we’ve ever tried a oner it succeeds,” Moorhead says, adding, “The thing that’s the most challenging about it is you have to commit to everything.”
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