Very cool some film students in the UK…

Very cool: some film students in the UK have taken upon themselves to remake 28 Days Later, Kill Bill, and Forrest Gump as 1 minute shorts with no cutting whatsoever.

One-take films are a cinematic ideal which, for obvious reasons, cannot be easily achieved with features.  For example, in the late 1940′s – even with all his talent and a Hollywood studio’s resources behind him – Hitchcock only managed to simulate a single take feature film by cleverly masking all his cuts in the Jimmy Stewart-starrer Rope.  The technology of the era didn’t help his efforts, either.

As far as I know, the only filmmaker to have ever pulled off a one-take feature is Colombian director Spiros Stathoulopoulos – just a couple of years ago, in fact – with his crime thriller PVC-1, which was shot in one continuous 80-plus-minute take.  No mulligans for this guy!  His actors and his crew got only one chance to get it right.  Since he was the DP, he was under the same level of pressure as everyone else.  The camera was hanging from his body on a Steadicam harness the whole time.

PVC-1 screened at one of the Cannes sidebars when I was there in 2007, but I was unable to see it.  I do remember it made quite a splash.  Just the guts to try to accomplish such a feat are in themselves worthy of admiration.

Via @MoviesForYou.