The Laroquod Experiment: One Shot

one shot

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In the waning days of the last millenium, a few of us got together to rehearse for a script written and directed by Sean Lewis. Shot on location, the rehearsals ranged through the city streets between our loft apartment and our writing office, and they were each recorded in a single take—one shot, every time.

There is no final version, but the progress in performance and camerawork in just five complete runthroughs is a small taste of what we could achieve in the course of dozens of iterations over the 48 hours of the coming Toronto Film Challenge. See the previous post below for details.

Each of the one-shot rehearsals is too long to post in its entirety, so I want to draw your attention to a particular sequence in which one character flips a coin. In the earlier shots of this sequence the camera is tentative and searching, with some unsuccessful experimentation. By the fifth take it has a much better idea of where it wants to be and when. You can also see the improvement in the intensity of the performances, with the actors wandering further astray from their scripts, to good effect.

One Shot Coin Toss

take 3

take 5

Now imagine the 30th take! How far can we take this shooting style? How surefooted a camera, and how polished a set of performances, can we achieve without a cut? For our team, this will be the point of the film challenge. If you are interested in joining up, all of the requirements are laid out in this post, so indicate your interest by adding a comment to that post, or to this one below.

And for anyone who is curious to see a bit more, here's a clip from later on in that same fifth take:

One Shot Walk, take 5

the rogue

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I loved this one-shot. To me, the entire 13-minute shoot was like hitchin' a ride on a freight train you *knew* was going to plunge off a cliff at some point...or off a rooftop. Man, wouldn't it have been awesome if they could have jumped off the roof somehow and just left the frame empty? That would have been a weird ending..."Dem bullets in yer guns?".

I love the idea of multiple locations vs one location because the multiples make the film larger than life somehow, more than one location. Of course, the original one-shot was intended to be a Point A to Point B script first, with all dialogue written afterwards to fit. Is it possible to write/improv a scene that doesn't require a set location? Nine minutes worth? Could be a subway ride, a walk through a mall, down a back alley, ends with jumping in a cab. Or starts with them getting out of one? What is the best way to include ideas like these without actually writing them down first?

Well, just like we've been given a challenge to shoot in 48 hours and do it all in one shot, we *could* say it starts at Point A, goes to Point B, they try to make it to Point C but end up at Point D. This is just an idea and I don't want it to neccessarily direct the story but I would like to use some interesting locations if possible.