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How to pull off an effective ONE-ER
So, why bother with a ONE-ER?
Because it's flashy? Yes it is but no, it wasn't written in the script to be a ONE-ER either, it wasn't until we were in shoot prep that it was decided that the best way to tell the story of this scene would be in an unbroken take for two important reasons:
ONE. Perspective. The scene needs to introduce all the supporting characters of the movie and what their relationship dynamics are, the best way in to any scene is to find a point of view, I chose Marie (the waitress, the outsider of the story) as this scene is played most effectively from her perspective, allowing her (and the audience) to be in the middle of the action as it plays out organically.
TWO. Momentum. For a long scene like this to work with multiple characters, the pacing needs to be carefully timed. You could do this through cutting but this would take away from the perspective of Marie.
Blocking a ONE-ER can either be hugely liberating, or your worst nightmare... Especially if you're like us and had a crew of two...
So here's a practical guide of sorts to avoid the latter:
1. Get in the space as early as you can without the cast or crew. If you know you're doing a ONE-ER you can't wing this, even if you haven't worked out any blocking just get a feel for the space.
2. Block with principle cast first, NO supporting artists or camera YET. The first thing to get right is the performances and getting the actors confident with what they're doing first.
For this scene Marie is holding a tray with glasses and will be navigating the camera and supporting artists, last thing you want to do is overload your actor with too much to think about all at once.
3. Block the camera. ONLY once the principle cast performances are getting closer to where they need to be and they're comfortable with the scene, it's time to bring in the camera.
Everyone is different but for me I think the most effective camera blocking works around the actors and gives them room for their performances to breathe, there are of course exceptions and a ONE-ER like this has to be carefully choreographed for it to work, but if you can, put the technical burden of hitting marks more so on the camera, than on the actors.
The great thing is at this point the actors should be confident in their blocking, so now you've introduced the camera it's not changing what they're doing much, for this scene I tweaked the actors positions very little to work around the camera.
4. Confident with the camera. I was walking backwards throughout this scene with the camera for 2-3 minutes a take, making sure to keep framing and not knock into anything or ANYONE! It does happen but practice like hell for the rehearsal with just the principle cast so it's muscle memory.
5. Don't forget the sound guy. At this point you need your sound op in on the rehearsal he needs to know the space and the blocking as well as you do. We had radio mics on actors but the best sound was coming from the boom and we didn't want to ADR this.
6. Don't make it harder than it has to be. Rig your camera to be as light or well balanced as possible, for this I opted for handheld not gimble or steadicam as it was the easiest to practically pull off.
Use all the helpful toys. I didn't have a focus puller and the focus is constantly changing, so I opted to use the DJI Focus Pro (basically fancy auto focus). I'd highly recommend it as it allows you to switch focus targets on the fly seamlessly without any auto focus jutter. What also was a challenge is I needed to shoot this on wide lens 18mm, and I only had a photographic one, so this would have made manual focus a practical impossibility for me.
7. Supporting artist blocking. When the SA's had arrived on set I first had them all watch a full camera rehearsal of the scene with the camera, then individual or in couple's I'd place them, run through their blocking of the scene and then run it through several times, as they've seen the camera blocking as well this reduces accidental collisions.
8. Momentum when shooting. This scene in particular was exhausting to do and had to be run through 14 times fully to get the right take. We would take a brief break after take 8 and kept time between takes short so we didn't loose the energy of the scene and kept everyone on their toes, the SA's especially had a lot of fun with this style of filming and there was never a dull moment. Communicate clearly, keep it moving and most importantly, keep it fun.
And finally ordering a truck load of Dominos Pizza also helps greatly ;)
How the f**k do we light this?
The choice to light 360 degrees.
Not only did it need to look lit from any angle, we had the challenge of a camera, sound guy and lots of actors continuously moving which can cause showing issues. As it was a real location and not a sound stage we couldn't add any above lighting, we also were going to see the ceiling as well. The dilemma was also this was a large space, how do we create contrast and make it visually interesting.
The solutions:
- Practical fixtures that are heavily diffused.
- On camera props like adding in a photo booth provided a large diffuse key light for the interior.
- Coloured up-lighters to help add depth and separate the actors background.
- A camera flash continuously going off throughout the scene.
Exterior.
- As it was a night scene and we were favoring naturalism over any stylized cinematography, we opted again for practical up lighters set at a cooler temperature to the interior for contrast.
Reflections in glass.
There's a lot of glass in this location and I was pretty proud to say no CG crew removal was required with the careful angling of various doors and sticking to a very strict motion path that avoided unwanted reflections.
Costumes and contrast.
The infamous green dress.
We knew for Lisa her costume had to stand out, her character is someone wants to attract attention and this is her art exhibition, luckily the actress playing the role Lauren Shotton came across by chance what she described as one of the "ugliest dresses she'd ever seen" while on a bus passing a charity shop, upon seeing a photo I was indeed shocked at the glorious green and pink monstrosity she'd found, it was perfect!
What's great about this dress is particular is the contrast is gives Lisa in the scene, drawing your eye to her immediately, we also made the on location up lighters a matching green, as if Lisa has put a lot of thought into the presentation of the evening. These details, even if you don't conciously notice them straight away help lend to the overall believably of the scene.
The exhibition is populated by rich art dealers and the aristocratic Aberdeen family, so their expensive muted suits and conservative dresses are uniform.
Marie's costume, a plain waitress costume with no colour looks great when contrasted with Lisa's gregarious dress.
As we didn't have a costume department for the movie, the actors had a great deal of input on their costumes, with a lot of time and effort put into sourcing and testing various costume ideas. I cannot stress enough how important the costume choices are, it can transform a character or break it if wrong. With the Caretaker it was so important to get this right, and the process we went though especially for Eddie the protagonist deserves it's own full breakdown.
The Caretaker comes to UK & US streaming this July 14th 2026.
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