Invisible Cut Techniques for Seamless Long Take Filmmaking

[00:00:00]Hello, Steve Ramsden here with DIY Moviemaking  and this week I’m going to show to you four   tricks to make continuous action look like one  long take - by using hidden “invisible” cuts!

[00:00:16]This video is sponsored by Artlist, royalty-free  music and sound effects for video creators.

[00:00:21]I am obsessed with long takes in movies - they  just immerse the viewer and can be a great   way to keep your audience glued to action  that’s supposedly unfolding in real time.   But long takes are very difficult and expensive  to get right. So it’s not surprising that many   filmmakers have used various tricks to join  several shorter takes together using hidden cuts,   to create the illusion of seamlessness. I just  find these kinds of shots fascinating and I’ve   even tried several of my own fake-long-take  experiments over the years. So I’ve come up   with this handy list of 4 tricks you can  try to invisibly join your shots together.

[00:00:58]I’m always trying to add production value by doing  a lot with a little, so if you want to see lots   more fun DIY Moviemaking tips and tricks like  this, then of course hit that subscribe button.

[00:01:08]Invisible cuts, also know as ‘hidden cuts’ have  been growing in popularity in recent years,   in fact even some entire films like 1917 and  Birdman have been based on using this as their   central gimmick. And these films and others  like them use the same surprisingly simple   techniques I’m going to share today. These  aren’t just decisions being made when editing,   these are decisions you would make before and when  you shoot so that you get the right shots on the   day. And some of them are surprisingly cheap. So  just like I teach in my course DIY Moviemaking   for which the link is below, you don’t always  need a lot of money to get some creative shots,   you just need to spend a bit more time planning.  So, here’s 4 tricks you can try for seamless cuts: Trick number 1 is the easiest, and that is to  obscure the frame with a colour match. This is   a method of hiding a join by ending your first  shot and starting your second shot on the same   solid colour, usually black. This is the very  basic method that Alfred Hitchcock used to join   a lot of his shots together in his 1948 film Rope.  The camera usually pushes in on a dark object,   like the back of someone’s suit or a piece of  furniture, until the lens is covered. Then the   shot cuts, and the camera moves back out into the  next take. This was done because Hitchcock wanted   it to feel like a real-time story with real,  unblinking suspense, but he was limited by the   length of each reel of film, and so as a result  most of the movie is made in chunks of about 7   to 10 minutes. There are some conventional cuts  in the film too - which everybody forgets - but   about half of them are joined together in this  method to look like long continuous takes.

[00:02:41]While these supposedly hidden cuts  in Rope appear very obvious today,   you can see the same technique  used more subtly in more modern   films like Birdman - this is always a  nice easy place to hide a hidden cut.

[00:02:52]Here’s exactly the same thing in  1917 when entering the dugout.

[00:02:56]To try this method yourself you don’t need any  fancy editing at all, because the join can just   be a straight cut that no-one notices. However you  could put in a quick cross-fade if you wanted to.

[00:03:06]So, that’s the first trick - obscure  the fame, or at the very least,   start and end on the same solid colour.

[00:03:13]Trick number 2 is to use what is called  a whip pan. A pan just means swinging   the camera to look left or right, and a  whip pan just means doing this quickly,   so that the image becomes blurred. This  can be another great moment to hide a cut.   You can see this method used a lot in  Birdman, especially when characters are   walking around corners or a quick pan  shows us what a character is seeing.

[00:03:33]You also see these a lot in ‘found  footage’ movies to join takes together,   as their visual style will mean that the camera  is usually being flung around quickly anyway,   as if being held by one of the characters.

[00:03:44]To try this method, all you have  to do on the day is film the end   of the first shot and the start  of the second shot with the same   fast whip pan in a similar direction, and  these should join together pretty easily.

[00:03:55]Again, if you time your cut well, when editing  this can once again just be a straight cut,   with no other tricky editing required.

[00:04:02]So that’s trick number 2 - use a whip pan.

[00:04:05]Now when you’re making a film with invisible  cuts you’ll also want to seamlessly join your   audio together with a smooth transition, some  consistent sound design, and maybe also a music   track. A great resource for audio is our sponsor  Artlist, which is a fantastic subscription-based   royalty-free music and sound effects site. I  use Artlist for many professional jobs I do   through my production company, because they've  got lots of high-quality tracks and they offer   unlimited downloads for one simple license and  one monthly fee. The license covers everything,   no matter what size of project you are working  on. And if you want to sign up to Artlist you   can use my link below this video to get two  extra months. So spare a thought for your   audio as well when disguising a hidden  cut, because sound is half the picture!

[00:04:49]Moving on, trick number 3 for an invisible cut  is to use a foreground object to ‘wipe’ across   the frame, sometimes known as a ‘frame-block  transition’. This is usually an object that   passes between the camera and the character  that allows an opportunity for a hidden cut.   This is done by moving the join with the  object, so you start seeing the second shot   before you finish seeing the first. The main thing  with this one is that the camera and the action   in each shot need to start and end in a very  similar place so that nobody questions the result.

[00:05:18]Here’s another good example from Children  of Men when Clive Owen exits the car - when   the camera moves past the door, that  is the join between the two shots.

[00:05:27]And here’s exactly the same thing in Spectre when  James Bond leaves the hotel room via the window.

[00:05:32]You can see a much more action-orientated  version of this trick in Kingsman the Secret   Service during the ‘church fight’ scene - here  they use people moving past the camera to again   disguise the move from one shot to the next.  They also are filming using a high shutter speed,   to give very crips edges and no blur,  and they even added what the editor calls   a ’rage’ effect to add some artificial  vibration to the camera the whole time.   This makes the joins even harder to spot, because  the whole frame feels like it’s constantly moving.

[00:06:00]But staying with the basics for now,  to try this wipe technique yourself,   let’s say this is where you want to hide your  cut. The trick here is probably to do quite   a few takes to give you a number of choices,  and then pick the one that lines up the best.

[00:06:13]How you edit will depend on what edit program you  are using, but most of the main ones will allow   you to do draw a simple ‘mask’ over one of your  shots. This basically just displays the part of   the clip you want to be seen, and hides the rest.  So you can drop your two clips onto your timeline,   put the first one above the other and line them up  where you want the change to happen. Then draw a   mask down the edge of whatever object is moving  past the camera. Then you can add keyframes to   move this mask in time with the object, and this  will then reveal your second shot underneath.

[00:06:44]So that’s trick number 3 - using a foreground  object for a frame-block transition.

[00:06:50]And finally we have method number 4, which is  really less of a single cut and more of a whole   new ‘fake’ shot, which gets built to bridge the  gap between the two real shots.This will often be   used for situations where there would have just  been no way to perfectly line the two shots up,   or it would be an impossibly tricky shot to  get. These ‘fake’ shots are often composited   out of several parts from several real shots,  plus sometimes more elaborate things like CGI.   This happens a few times in 1917. Sometimes  it’s too difficult to line two takes up,   so they transition briefly to a CGI body double  to link these two awkward shots together.

[00:07:25]If you want to try this more complex approach  of creating a whole new shot to cover a join,   you will end up with a lot more layers on  your editing timeline than any of these   other methods! So you will probably want to  use a proper animation or compositing program   rather than just a regular editing program,  as it will give you so much more control.

[00:07:42]I’ve tried my own versions of this technique  of building a whole new shot to hide a join   in some of my ‘fake long take’ experiments. In  this example of my ‘window smash’ effect video,   the two real shots were the start, me inside the  house - and the end, me outside the house on the   ground, and then I filmed some extra pieces to  link these two shots together with a new fake   shot. I shot the jump separately in front of a  green screen along with some background plates of   moving towards the window and tilting down to the  ground, and then I used objects in the foreground   like falling glass to hide all the messy joins. I did exactly the same thing for my ‘jumping out   of a moving car’ video - I filmed two real shots,  one in the car and one out by the road - and   then filmed some additional shots to link these  together, which I cut out and composited together   with masks. I filmed a jump out of a stationary  car, I filmed the door being pushed open,   and I filmed the moving background out of  the car window. And the result is linking two   real shots together with one fake shot that  would have been impossible to get for real So that’s trick number 4 - and the possibilities  really are endless when compositing different   can shoot and edit using invisible  cuts in your next film project!

[00:08:57]And if you just want to learn how to make the best  film you can right now, then you will love my free   webinar where I revel my top ten tips for making  your passion project on a budget. It’s the list I   wish had existed when I was first starting out  and I knew absolutely nothing! So I’ve put this   free list together to give you some filmmaking  inspiration no matter what level you are at.