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In [[filmmaking]], a '''long take''' (also called a '''continuous take''', '''continuous shot''', or '''oner''') is shot with a duration much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general. Significant camera movement and elaborate blocking are often elements in long takes, but not necessarily so. The term "long take" should not be confused with the term "[[long shot|Wide shot]]", which refers to the use of a [[long-focus lens]] and not to the duration of the take. The length of a long take was originally limited to how much film the [[magazine|Camera magazine]] of a [[motion picture camera|Movie camera]] could hold, but the advent of [[digital video]] has considerably lengthened the maximum potential length of a take.
Andy Warhol and collaborating avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas shot a 485-minute-long experimental film, Empire (1965), on 10 rolls of film using an Auricon camera via 16 mm film, which allowed longer takes than its 35 mm counterpart. "The camera took a 1,200 ft roll of film that would shoot for roughly 33 minutes."
Another example from television can be seen in the first season of HBO's True Detective. In episode four, "Who Goes There", protagonist Detective Rust Cohle (portrayed by Matthew McConaughey) is undercover as part of a biker gang who have decided to brazenly rob a drug den located in a dangerous neighborhood. The shot begins with the bikers arriving at the drug den with McConaughey's character reluctantly in tow. The six-minute shot moves in and out of various residences, through several blocks and over a fence, while shots are fired by shouting gangsters, bikers and police as they arrive on the scene. McConaughey at first assists the biker gang, then turns on them to abduct the leader, dragging him along for more than half of the continuous shot. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga commented to The Guardian, "We required the involvement of every single department, like a live theatre show. We had make-up artists hiding in houses so they could dash out and put make-up on Cohle's Ginger's head. We panned away for a second to do that. We also had ADs peppered around the neighborhood with extras who had specific things to yell and specific places to run. We had stunt guys coordinating with stunt drivers to pull up at the right time, special-effects guys outside throwing foam bricks and firing live rounds."
The John Wick series of films are known for their long-take fight scenes. This was due to the budgetary constraints of using only a single high-end camera for all the filming, and required close choreography with the various extras involved in the fights, who had to run behind the camera after being among the first fallen attackers to come in again as new attackers.
In 2010, artist engineer Jeff Lieberman co-directed a 4-minute music video with Eric Gunther, featuring the indie band OK Go performing their song "End Love". The video was shot in a continuous take using three cameras, running 18 hours from before sunset to 11 am the following day. The footage was condensed using time-lapse techniques ranging up to 170,000 times speedup, with some brief slow-motion segments also recorded at 1500 frames per second.
An example of this is the "Copacabana shot" featured in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), in which Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) takes his girlfriend to a nightclub passing through the kitchen. The 10 Most Stunning Long Takes in Movie History — Taste of Cinema
Robert Altman's The Player (1992) opens with an elaborately choreographed eight-minute shot that follows multiple characters in multiple locations, both inside and outside. The 10 Most Stunning Long Takes in Movie History — Taste of Cinema Among the 17 scenes that comprise the shot, one character refers to the four-minute shot that opens Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). The 15 Greatest Opening Long Takes in Cinema History — Page 2 — Taste of Cinema
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) ends with a five-minute continuous shot. The Dardenne brothers also shot long sequences for Two Days, One Night (2014), some of them consisting of ten minutes.
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