Many years ago, one of my cameramen, who had been trained by some of the black & white legends of the Indian Celluloid Industry told me about a shot that his guru had masterminded. Apparently, the shot required the hero to walk out of a room, walk along the balcony, come to the grand, curving staircase, walk down it and walk through the rather large curtain draped drawing room into the portico area where a car was waiting. All the while delivering a dialog.

I was told about the difficulties of lighting the sequence because as we all know, lighting up for B & W films is much tougher than lighting up for color, especially in those days when shadow-less shooting was the norm. And color matching/balancing between indoors and outdoors was insane. Today shadows are allowed, indeed expected. Night effect/indoor effect shots flow effortlessly into outdoor sequences. And the tools we now have at our command to play with the light textures  are mind boggling.

So when someone posted a Malayalam song on Facebook and touted that it was a single take song I wasn’t particularly impressed.

Take a look…

http://youtu.be/TMW9aMZXVho

It was perhaps a coincidence that just a few days back, a ‘Second Hand’ Telugu song ‘Mr. Subba Rao’ also shot to fame on the single shot format.

http://youtu.be/wu7cBHk4oM8

I saw both the clips with great interest. And I was suitably impressed. But at the end of it all I concluded that they were not worth the hype. They simply did not add value to the narrative. They seemed to me a cheap, gimmicky trick to draw attention to their films in a kind of promotional gesture. I though it was quite similar to the use of the Item Numbers in the recent past. Movies became more famous for the Item numbers than for the story of the movie itself.

They reflect a skill, yes. And require total coordination between hundreds of individuals. But at the end of it all, they are just that – a show piece. With no intrinsic value.

I was then reminded of a music video I had seen many years ago…where the end effect was to indeed make it look like a seamless, single shot. But we knew that it was shot in several takes and scenes. But the way the song was stitched together made it look as if the camera had just run its course as the actors went about their business.

Take a look…it’s a Spice Girls Classic.

http://youtu.be/gJLIiF15wjQ

There’s another music video of the same genre. And it was Alanis Morissette I think who walks down an Australian street in the nude, singing her song. Makes the whole song look bizarre…a nude woman walking down the street. No expression on the face of people walking by. No shock. No amusement. No vicarious pleasure. Of course we immediately realized that it was a chroma shoot and that none of the roadside actors knew what they were being mixed up with, visually.

But I can’t find that clip. Maybe someone out there can help