A few years ago I read In The Blink of an Eye, by Walter Murch.
It’s the behind-the-scenes story of the making of Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola.
Murch was the editor.
In the book he talks about how during the helicopter and napalm scene, Coppola used an almost unbelievable 5 cameras all shooting simultaneously – 3 minutes of film each – to record the one time event.
Of course, CGI and digital video have rendered that ‘unbelievable’ event not only commonplace but rather arcane.
A few years later, Robert Altman shot his famous open to The Player in one take, no edits.
Pretty impressive.
Until now.
Take a look at the video by OK GO.
All one take.
No edits
And a whole lot more complicated than the Altman open.
A whole lot more.
Time moves on.
This video will never get an Emmy for editing.
There isn’t one edit in the whole thing.
Video courtesy of my nephew, filmmaker Brett Savaglio
1 Comment
Aaron October 25, 2010
There actually is one edit in the video, around 2:25, after the waterfalll. OK Go talks about it here.
The editor also used a whole lot of time compression and stretching to make the machine line up with the music. During the shoot, each section of the machine restarted a section of the song, then everything was re-timed in editing.
So there’s a heck of a lot more trickery here than in Altman’s opening shot to The Player. Which, of course, was 4 minutes longer than this.
If you’d like a more impressive OK Go video to use as an example, it’s White Knuckles, which uses dozens of dogs instead of a Rube Goldberg machine.