Jump to content

What is the most dialogue you’ve had in a single take?


Izen Ears

Recommended Posts

  • Izen Ears changed the title to What is the most dialogue you’ve had in a single take?

Over the years I did many hour+ takes, much to the chagrin of my boom ops.  This included one-take movies as well as the shooting of live-theatre works.  "Real" ie trained actors can do this, like they do every night in theatre.  What makes this kind of thing amazing in movies now is the difficulty of getting great location sound during all the talent, camera, prop and G+E moving that would be happening during a long take, plus all the location issues, even on a sound stage.  Really long takes are tough for everyone, but I think they are toughest for the sound dept.   (See Ursa Straps interview with Kiff McManus, the mixer of "Boiling Point": 34 speaking parts inside and outside a large location set with 3 working kitchens for 90+ minutes!)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For me it was 7 or 8 heavy dialogue pages with 9 speaking parts shot on a 360 dolly track. In the edit they ended up cutting it up between takes as they never quite nailed it all in one shot. These things need to be choreographed meticulously. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
  • 6 months later...

Wow!  I'm impressed with the technical challenges you guys have pulled off.  Before it went off the air, I worked for a short time as a boom op on All My Children.  Specifically, it was for the 1 day a week that they would do the exterior scenes.  We would tackle up to 35 pages of dialogue a day - often without rehearsal, and often times having the 1st AD call "moving on" without even asking the sound department if we were good with the scene.  I think the longest single take I did was a 5 page walk and talk with two characters settling on a bench to finish the scene.  I had a full zeppelin on a long pole and by the end of the scene my muscles were failing and starting to shake.  Thankfully, my muscle failure didn't transmit into handling noise on the pole and the mixer gave me and "atta boy" at the end of the take.

 

My favorite story from working on this soap opera was this:  We were grinding out a long day with 30+ pages of dialogue to get through.  Near the end of our day the AD says, "This next scene is MOS".  I am thankful for the brief break and head back to the mixer's cart for a much needed relief and have a seat.  I momentarily enjoyed the pause of the non-stop day until the AD tells me that it's "MOS without dialogue but we still need sound rolling".  Tired and perturbed by the AD's new definition of "MOS" I grab the boom and try to capture some nat sound.  At this point the actors enter the "MOS" scene and start ad-libing dialogue.  Got it.  MOS now means, sound rolling....with dialogue?????

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I regularly do a corporate web series where most of our scenes are 7-12 pages and 5-10 people. Because of the content they are talking about, despite being a scripted narrative, the dialog has to be pretty much exact. We always end up with teleprompters standing by for the actors that can’t keep up for their close ups. 
Not sure if these are my longest, but my taped sides often end up 3 lanes wide otherwise they’d drag on the floor

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

My longest "dialogue" was somewhere above 70min on a fiction movie. That was due to the way the director worked with the teenage and children cast. Everything was running and then she let them be themselves until they forget they're on a filmset. Then she occasionally called in some directions.
We shot a few scenes this way in 720p to fit the media cards in the Arri.
Apart from that I had a few interview situations in that time range that are technically "dialogue".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...