Sully links to this website which has a collection of tracking shots, but it oddly neglects what I think is one of the best ever- the school hallway scene from Donnie Darko:
Consider this your nightly open thread.
Tracking Shots
by John Cole| 42 Comments
This post is in: Movies, Previous Site Maintenance
calipygian
I seriously doubt your commitment to sparkle motion.
jnfr
But it’s not even 4 o’clock yet. Do we have to go to sleep early tonight?
Incertus
If you’re a little disappointed in something Obama has done recently, I have something to tell you.
montysano
There doesn’t seem to be a Youtube of it, but the long tracking shot from the street battle scene in “Children of Men” is a favorite of mine.
“Goodfellas” and “Casino” suck me in every time, just for the pure pleasure of watching Scorcese’s work.
NewUnansweredQuestions
The explosion of Mr Creosote and the tracking shot out onto the streets in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life …
Not on this list? Then the list is just silly.
calipygian
Win.
Plus the Boogie Nights tracking shot at the party is a direct rip off of Mikhail Kalatozov’s “I Am Cuba”.
Boogie Nights is an amazing movie because it is probably the most entertaining, shamelessly derivitive movie ever made. Just about every single scene or line in the movie is very thinly ripped off from some other, superior source. But I don’t care, it still good.
Ted
They left out the Dave Bowman I’m-going-to-kill-HAL tracking shot, another of Kubrick’s good ones.
Tom in Texas
If you don’t mind a touch of violence, I think this shot from the Korean movie Oldboy was incredible.
Great movie, by the way. Wild ending and several fascinating shots.
smiley
As the second comment at that link points out, the Touch of Evil scene was not shot with a steadicam. It is, however, credited as being the first tracking shot.
Andrew
That’s basically the tracking shot to end all tracking shots.
The 2nd best is the in-car shot from the same film.
Incertus
That must be why it’s pretty much the only P. T. Anderson movie I’ve ever really liked.
Ted
You didn’t like his last one?
Incertus
Can’t say as I did, though that could be in part because I’m not wild about the source material. Upton Sinclair’s writing style doesn’t do much for me on an aesthetic level–I prefer plot-driven to character-driven writing. As for the film, I felt like I was being manipulated in a pretty clumsy way right from the opening scene, and I didn’t think the story had earned the right to do that yet.
Dreggas
Pentagon to Iraqi’s: Go Cheney yourselves!
JGabriel
No discussion of tracking shots can be complete without mention of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, or Alexandr Sokurov’s Russkiy Kovcheg (aka Russian Ark)
Russian Ark is, as far as I know, the longest single tracking shot in history, at about 98 minutes. They had to start over twice, if I remember correctly. They did it on DV and the cameraman had to carry something like 50-60 lbs. worth of batteries on his back.
Pretty good movie too, if you don’t mind that it has no plot to speak of.
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srv
tracking shots need to be continuous, Darko has many cuts.
de Palma’s Snake Eyes was pretty complicated – 12 minute opening.
Seitz
Michael Penn’s video for “Try” was a single take tracking shot of about three and half minutes. And it’s a really good song.
Seitz
Come to think of, so is the video for Spoon’s “The Underdog”.
tom.a
There’s a female musician in those iPod commercials who does most of her music videos as tracking shots, quite well done though I don’t care much for the music which is why I’m rambling on because I can’t remember her name even though she’s rather cute, a long-haired brunette and a Canadian for whatever that’s worth, ah, Feist, that’s it.
Seitz
Ooh, even better, Cibo Mato’s “Sugarwater”! Dueling tracking shots, and an absolutely amazing video. Trust me, you might want to watch this one a couple times to figure out how they did it.
Steve V
Yeah, I don’t know if that Darko sequence uses a steadycam or a dolly. That opening sequence from Goodfellas is unbelievable.
Fruitbat
Interestingly enough, that Michael Penn video was directed by P. T. Anderson. And the Cibo Matto video was directed by Michel Gondry, before he jumped to feature films. Spike Jonze did some choice work before he went cinematic; for excellent tracking shots, try “California” by Wax.
Fwiffo
You can always count on Gondry to fuck your brain.
I’m gonna expose my Whedonophilia by pointing out the long tracking shots near the beginning of the BtVS episodes The Body and Anne, as well as the long tracking shots showing off the layout of the ship in Serenity and the pilot of Firefly.
Liberal Masochist
I think we may be confusing terminology a bit. Do we mean a long take?
The scene in Dazed and Confused when Wooderson, Pink and Mitch walk into the pool hall to “Hurricane” is fantastic. Reference to Scorcese obviously.
jrm78
The video for the Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar by Michael Gondry could be considered a creatively edited tracking shot.
One of my faves by Gondry
jake
“Wing nut” is now legitimate.
But wing nuts are still bastards.
Mary
Seitz, Vampire Weekend is big on single tracking shots, too: Oxford Comma
(But THIS is my all-time favourite Spoon video.)
Soylent Green
What, no mention of Robert Altman’s “The Player” and its amazing eight-minute opening?
JGabriel
Fwiffo:
Hmm, I may be wrong on this, but I think Whedon’s longest tracking shot is at the beginning of Angel episode 5.01. It’s about six minutes long, and follows each of the major characters while roving through and circling around an entire floor set. Probably a steadicam shot.
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Eural Joiner
After years of having friends aggressively recommend “Firefly” – to the point of annoyance – me and the misses gave it a whirl last week.
One of – if not “the” – best TV series ever.
And 90% of its success was due to the cast and the layout of the set for the Serenity (I actually always felt like I knew where I was on the ship – or where I was going or where other relevant locations were).
bago
Star Guitar is aces! Procedurally generated terrain for the win!
The Briscoe Kid
I’ve added it to my Netflix queue while I wait for the return of the Sarah Connor Chronicles and the most awesomest terminatix evah.
The Briscoe Kid
^terminatrix … Is it possible to misspell a word if it isn’t really a word?
YellowJournalism
*sniff* I love you guys.
The video for Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” (a favorite song of mine) always reminds me of “Dazed and Confused”. I think it’s either a long tracking shot or contains a lot of long tracking shots, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen it, I may be very wrong.
And yes, you can never go wrong with a repeat viewing of “Goodfellas”.
Bruce Baugh
There’s the driving scene in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and the last shot of it in both it and Soderbergh’s remake. Cheating a bit, since it isn’t actually a single shot, the railroad sequence from Tarkovksy’s Stalker is a brilliant bit of shifting mood.
The opening shot of Contact is a joy, and very much in the spirit of Sagan at his best, I think.
Going into the realm of cheese, the opening bit in Independence Day with the alien ship over the moon, is actually pretty darned cool, I think.
Alex Proyas does some neat long tracking shots with miniature cities in The Crow and Dark City.
charles pierce
The post-Agincourt tour of the battlefield from Branagh’s Henry V — with him carrying Christian Bale’s body and the choir singing the Non Nobis — gets my vote.
charles pierce
The post-Agincourt tour of the battlefield from Branagh’s Henry V — with him carrying Christian Bale’s body and the choir singing the Non Nobis — gets my vote.
dlw32
The Apple ipod commercial with Feist is a good one because of the amount of choreography involved. The sheer number of dancers and the amount of movement.
But my favorite has to be the beginning of Serenity because it has a point. In a minute or two of tracking you get a sense of the layout of the ship, the character of the ship, and an introduction to the main characters. It sums up the TV show brilliantly in an amazingly short time.
john b
i second the snake eyes mention. the movie itself wasn’t nearly as good, but that opening shot is ridiculous.
zmulls
“The Player” is mentioned on that site, and that’s a great shot.
We’re talking about “one long take with no cutaways and really, really tough to coordinate and get right” sorts of shots.
You might include, even though the movie sucked, the opening to “The Bonfire of the Vanities”
But my favorite omitted “long one-take” shot is the opening to “Postcards From The Edge” directed by Mike Nichols. There’s even some bravado acting from Meryl Streep, who is playing an actress playing a role, and has to “act” a key scene and then “flub” a line in just the right way at just the right time. (The scripted flub — substituting “Mommy” for “money” also references the basic mother/daughter conflict for the film)
Fwiffo
Speaking of Contact, there’s this “impossible” steadicam shot.
Another film just pregnant with interesting camera work is Once Upon a Time in the West. One intesting long take on a crane is when Claudia Cardinale arrives in Flagstaff. Also, there is a really interesting dolly shot when Henry Fonda shows up after the shootout at the train car.
dagon
some really good comments here. as a reference to donnie darko, that opening scene actually has a mere 3 (possibly 4) cuts. it ranks: that’s one of the main reasons why that scene and the movie have acquired such accolades over the years.
however, for the uninitiated DO NOT, i repeat DO NOT watch richard kelly’s director’s cut first.
this was one of the few instances where the producer was more in tune with what the tone of the film should be than the auteur who helmed it. kelly should kiss the ass of whoever his editor was for the film because the director’s cut is muddled and if you listen to the voiceover, has no idea whatsoever it was that made the original film so special.
peace
btw, this dagon. i know more than film than you do (you in the general sence that is).
btw again. kudos to whoever it was that mentioned tarkovsky. i guess you guy’s aren’t complete wankers after all.