For all the miracles of digital cinematography, non-linear editing software, and the unseen wizardry that goes into something as small as sky replacement, they do open up a treacherous thought for audiences: “It’s fake. It’s all VFX. The bravura oner is actually a cheat stitched together in the edit.” In the acclaimed Netflix series “Adolescence,” it isn’t a cheat. Every episode exploring the fallout of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie (Owen Cooper), being accused of murdering one of his classmates, Katie (Emilia Holliday), is shot in a single take.
The true challenge for director Philip Barantini, cinematographer Matthew Lewis, and the entire filmmaking team on “Adolescence,” however, was to make the audience forget the gimmick of the oner and to bring out what great long takes actually do to an audience: make us very, very nervous. The haunting contained tension of Jamie and psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) in Episode 3 stands in contrast to the mazelike chaos that detectives Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Frank (Faye Marsay) wade through when they look for the motive and the murder weapon at Jamie’s school in Episode 2.
But for every episode, Barantini told IndieWire that an extensive rehearsal process was key. “The first week of rehearsals, we’d work with the core cast members in five-page blocks building up the performances piece by piece. The second week was a tech rehearsal where all departments would work through the episode in real-time with the actors to fine-tune before the last two days of tech rehearsal,” Barantini said.
During tech, background artists would join the run-throughs, and Barantini would fine-tune the kind of detail work that might only get picked up on a second watch. In the case of working with the nearly 300 children used for Episode 2, that meant making sure they had their mobile phones throughout and costuming assistant directors as teachers. They could give directions on camera and be listened to — or, with warning in advance, ignored — as the scene called for it.
The filmmakers’ focus throughout was on making the timings flow — in the conventional terms of our sense of pace, of course, but also spatial logistics. “In the first episode, we needed to find a house that was no more than a three-minute drive from the police station; the same with the hardware store in Episode 4. All told, the opening scene [in Episode 1] needed to be 11 minutes long so that the full exchange before, during, and after Owen is in the police van can be delivered,” Barantini said.
For Lewis and his camera team, achieving that kind of movement through space with precise timing required a staggering amount of planning, tracking vehicles, and handoffs. In the sequence in Episode 2 where Ryan (Kaine Davis) jumps through a ground-level window and tries to run from Bascombe before he’s arrested, Lewis wanted to make sure the camera kept up with the runners without the shot feeling like something out of “Call of Duty.” The camera needed to get ahead of them to grab frontal, more three-dimensional views of the chase. And for that, “Adolescence” needed a daisy chain of running operators and tracking vehicles.
The sequence starts with Lewis passing the camera through the window to his other operator, Lee David Brown, who was waiting to take it and run after the actors. Lewis, meanwhile, bolted behind the school building to hop onto a waiting vehicle.
“There’s a couple fairly spicy handoffs in that little sequence,” Lewis said. “I am just offscreen on a tracking vehicle, on the front of it, sort of strapped on. We convene, and he passes the camera back to me as I start going up the road, and he’s still running up the road as well. So he’s moving; I’m moving; and he passes the camera across. Then, we floor it.”
Once the vehicle caught up with the actors, a grip unbuckled Lewis from the hood of the vehicle, and he started running the camera up the alley where Ryan gets caught. But there was no rest for the weary, as once Frank books Ryan, Lewis and the camera hopped onto a rickshaw to get pulled back down the road to hand the camera off to a drone. The camera then had to fly a full field over to the murder location, where Jamie’s dad Eddie (Stephen Graham) is leaving flowers.
A spring-loaded docking system made the drone handoff easier, allowing Lewis to bring the camera in from any angle and not jolt the camera as it was secured. It took a lot of coordination with the grips, who were waiting with the drone just offscreen.
“[The drone] grabs really quietly without any sort of movement change. So that goes in. I actually change some settings on the camera on the side before I step away — I change the follow mode so that it’s just controlled on wheels, basically. Then, my operator, Lee, who ran that section, is then at the wheels getting ready. Then I step away, the drone spins up, the grips walk forward, and they let go of it exactly when they feel it’s being pulled out their hands,” Lewis said.
It took one more run into a waiting van that sped over toward the murder memorial, and then Lewis was doing another handoff to catch the drone, release the camera, and frame up Graham for the final shot. “It was a bit wild when I look back at it,” Lewis said. “Like, why did we think that was a normal thing to do?”
It’s not normal, but it is effective and deeply moving. “Not every genre is suited to a single take, but when it does work, the audience is thrown into it, and it’s live, they’re in this world,” Barantini said. “The best review I [read] recently was that someone wished we’d cut back to the court or the police station. When someone told them that they couldn’t as we’d filmed it in one take, they hadn’t realized — which was a sign that we’d all done our jobs right! It’s like Scorsese’s line on editing: Everyone thinks it’s good editing if you notice the cuts, but great editing is also when you don’t see it.”
“Adolescence” is now streaming on Netflix.
