Technique: Mastering the oner

Posted on Apr 24, 2026 by Admin

From Atonement to Adolescence, the oner has become one of film and TV’s most discussed techniques. Powerful storytelling tool or overhyped gimmick? Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC, ISC and Matt Lewis discuss…

Words Oliver Webb

Chances are you have seen a oner. TV shows have frequently been turning to them in recent years. The Bear, True Detective, Mr Robot and Daredevil have all employed the technique for certain scenes or episodes, while Netflix’s Adolescence went further, capturing all four of its episodes as single takes. Seth Rogen’s loving send-up of the film business, The Studio, even pokes fun at the trick (while also deploying it across several episodes). So, what’s behind this recent rise in oners, and is the trend here to stay?

Origins of the oner

Oners are long, uninterrupted camera shots that capture a scene – or in some cases a whole episode or film – in its entirety. Some are static long takes that simply let the action unfold, as in Steve McQueen’s 2008 movie Hunger, which features a 17-minute uninterrupted shot. Others are far more complex, such as the famous four-minute opening shot of Orson Welles’ 1958 film Touch of Evil, one of the technique’s most notable uses.

A crane shot of an unidentified figure placing a bomb in a car opens the film. The camera then gradually cranes out to reveal a Mexican-US border town, and follows the vehicle through the streets for roughly three-and-a-half minutes before the inevitable explosion. Not cutting away builds unrelenting tension as the viewer waits for the bomb to go off, and makes the first cut arrive like its very own blast.

The technique dates back to early-Hollywood cinema, although there’s fierce debate over which was the very first film to use it. One contender is the 1927 silent film Wings, which features an early example of a long tracking shot. To capture it, cinematographer Harry Perry used an inverted rig on an overhead rail to move through a bustling café. The continuous take required meticulous planning and choreography, and it still looks impressive to this day.

Meanwhile, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 Rope is widely regarded as the first whole feature-length film designed to appear as a single take. However, due to the technical limitations of the time, filming was restricted to roughly ten-minute segments – to the length of a film reel. DOPs Joseph A Valentine, ASC and William V Skall, ASC cleverly concealed the cuts to make it look seamless.

In his 1962 interviews with François Truffaut, Hitchcock later dismissed Rope as a ‘stunt’, describing the experiment as ‘quite nonsensical’ because it broke with his belief in the importance of editing for cinematic storytelling.

The technique has, however, continued to flourish in contemporary cinema, with films such as Birdman and 1917. Both appear as a continuous take, despite the presence of invisible cuts.

Show-off devices

While the oner has a long history, cinematographers and filmmakers remain divided on whether the technique is a powerful storytelling tool or simply a filmmaking exercise.

Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC, ISC believes filmmakers sometimes want to make something ‘symphonic’ for
the sake of it. “I love telling stories with a camera,” he begins. “The two oners I’m known for – Life and Atonement – I do think serve the story in a way that combining separate shots wouldn’t.”

Regarding the oner in Atonement, McGarvey recalls how director Joe Wright persuaded him to get on board with the idea. “I initially thought it was just calling attention to the structural side of cinematography when cinematography should only be in service of the story and narrative,” he says.

Wright explained to McGarvey the psychology behind the shot. “It’s like a near-death experience or an almost about-to-die experience. It should feel sort of celestial and carnivalesque.

“Robbie, the protagonist, expires at the end of the scene,” he continues. “The shots that follow show that, as he dies, a flame literally goes out. Joe called it the last slingshot towards heaven or hell. I liked the notion of that and it really guided the kinetic aspect of the shot and the circular movement within it.”

Lasting around five-and-a-half minutes, they shot the scene four times and used the third take. “We planned it out very carefully with designer Sarah Greenwood,” says McGarvey. “We built an 8x8ft maquette of the beach, including the vehicles, boats, carousel and Ferris wheel. We literally went round with a little lipstick camera and said where the camera should go.”

McGarvey knew how many extras were needed for the scene. “When the camera panned off the extras, they would all hurtle around and become extras somewhere else to make it look like we had thousands of people,” he says. “A few elements were painted out, but it was all done in camera.”

He argues the hero of the shot was operator Peter Robertson. “I even get nervous watching it now because it was such an expensive shot to set up!” he laughs.

In Life, a science-fiction horror film about discovering extraterrestrial life on Mars, the opening shot had to reveal both the spaceship and the labyrinthine layout of the station. “We were shooting in a very restricted environment, and director Daniel Espinosa wanted to give the audience a picture of the place they are about to see the drama unfold,” McGarvey explains. “There wasn’t going to be much opportunity for movement within subsequent shots.”

Despite being known for two famous examples, McGarvey remains sceptical of the oner. “I hate oners, even though I got nominated for an Oscar for one,” he chuckles. “There have been a few films when a oner was suggested and I’ve talked the director down from it.

“I’m suspicious of the motivation for a lot of one-shot scenarios. I love when cinematography has an energy and a tautness to it. I don’t like being dragged around like a wet blanket, photographically speaking…”

McGarvey believes some filmmakers simply see oners as an opportunity to show off cinematic agility. He compares them to “cinematographic Pilates. But it’s just an exercise. You have to really argue me down to convince me that one shots are effective filmmaking. I think they’re just show-off devices.”

For McGarvey, a rare instance of when a oner works is in Goodfellas. “It’s a prime example because it’s all about paranoia and the effect of drugs, things that define how I usually feel watching oners. It’s so discomforting, which is why it works so well in that film. You feel like you’re being dragged through somebody’s unhinged imaginings, which is exactly what it is.”

Executing the one shot

DOP Matt Lewis, who had previously worked with director Philip Barantini on Boiling Point, a feature film shot entirely in one take, was instrumental in one of the most high-profile oners of recent times: Adolescence. He knew the project would be shot as a oner a few years before filming started.

“After Boiling Point, there was a conversation about putting together a TV series with the same format in mind
and shooting it with the same character-focused and grounded methodology,” he says. “I think it’s better to write something as a oner than to write something and then try to convert it.”

Camera-wise, Lewis needed something that could achieve an under-the-radar visual language. “Ultimately, doing a oner TV series, we had to be able to move the camera in interesting ways,” he says. “Achieving this was no easy feat and came down to card space, battery life, video transmission, a gimbal that wouldn’t drift or struggle over a long period of time, mobility and, of course, operator fatigue.”

He turned to DJI’s Ronin 4D, a camera he claims blew everything else out of the water. “It doesn’t take very long to understand and set up the system,” he explains. “It’s all built in very cleanly, and it comes with a really strong video transmission. It gave us enough storage-card space, but we had to run the 6K head, which had slightly more rolling shutter issues.”

Lewis admits there were lens-choice limitations because of how lightweight the system was. “We had to find lenses that worked while also figuring out how to manage exposure when moving between interiors and exteriors – often a range of around ten stops,” he says. “We had to come up with a way of navigating exposure changes, which resulted in us choosing a Tilta Mirage variable ND filter. It was the lightest thing we could find on the market and is a fairly consumer-friendly option.”

During the shoot, the crew also had to hide lights where possible. “We had a lighting desk for a bunch of the episodes,” says Lewis. “We changed the level through scenes, so it was about getting all the timing right. Without knowing your technical foundations, it is impossible to start choreographing because you don‘t know what your limitations are.”

Ultimately, Lewis wanted the camera moves to feel inevitable and omnipotent without audiences ever thinking about the decision-making behind them. “The choreography and technical challenges were so intertwined,” he recalls. “We had to walk with the actors and test systems constantly to make sure everything was going to work and limit the thousands of things that could have gone wrong.

“My spinal column really appreciated being able to share the camera between multiple operators. With most other systems we were tied into being the sole operator. Here, it was easy for camera operator Lee David Brown and I to pass the camera back and forth.”

According to Lewis, the secret behind a strong oner is to always think about the motivation behind the movement. “It is about making sure every decision the camera makes feels like a result of the action in the scene and not of a layer above that, like a conscious decision-maker choosing to do something,” he explains. “I became very fastidious about making sure everything had a reason to happen. I think it paid off because people forget it’s a oner and that’s the aim.”

There was one element of the shoot Lewis found slightly distracting, however. “For me, the most distracting moment is the drone shot,” he admits. “That was in part because of the wind. Annoyingly, I just see the gusts of wind pushing the camera left and right as it descends. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice it anyway, except someone who knows images.”

Lewis was initially hesitant about oners before undertaking both projects. “I’m hoping people watch Adolescence and think oners are valid as a filmmaking technique and are not just a gimmick,” he says. “I wanted to try to approach it slightly differently. I wanted it to be the least flamboyant oner possible. I think anything that gets people stoked about filmmaking and excited by the behind the scenes is really cool as well.”

It remains to be seen whether anyone else will attempt a oner as ambitious as Adolescence. Choosing to capture a film, show or even single sequence in one take is always a risk. There is a distinct possibility the result will feel like a show-off device. As McGarvey and Hitchcock suggest, perhaps oners are more of a technical exercise for filmmakers than truly effective filmmaking.

Crafting the one shot nonetheless takes meticulous planning, skill and, as is the case with Adolescence, can work exceptionally well with the right story.