The Studio and the oner about the oner

Apple TV's The Studio has just released a bravura one-take shot episode all about shooting a one-take shot in a movie and it's superb.

Yes, we know; two stories about content and two about Apple TV in a row. But we'll all be up to our eyeballs in NAB kit for the next two weeks or so soon enough and this really is rather good. Given the fuss attending the single-shot Adolescence it's very zeitgeisty as well.

Say hello to The Studio, the latest Apple TV+ show that will deservedly win a clutch of awards while being watched by about a tenth of the number that tune in to Friends reruns on Netflix. The one-shot episode is, appropriately enough, called The Oner, and is the second episode of the two-part premiere of The Studio. Written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, it follows new movie studio boss Matt Remick (also played by Rogen) as he bumbles about a film set where the increasingly frazzled director (Sarah Polley playing herself, sort of) is trying to film the closing sequence of a movie in one-shot. Chaos naturally ensues. But it's good, intelligent chaos, rather than just slapstick, and you can see glimpses of it in this TV Line interview.

What makes the episode so worth chasing down to have a look at it though is the way it reveres the oner while showing all things that can go wrong with it. In many ways it's a film school module in itself. And, of course, it's being shot as a oner too. This leads to some very meta jokes. The use of whip pans to disguise a cut is discussed, Polley says they're not doing that, and right at the moment they use a whip pan to mask a cut; the bookend concept is explained, helps ruin at least one take of the movie, and then is successfully deployed at the end of the episode.

One of the central conceits of the episode is that the film's ending sequence has to be shot as the sun sets. All of which meant the crew was filming at the house location in 90 minute slots over four consecutive nights as the golden hour waits for no man. Hence the whip pans etc.

And as with Adolescence, there was also some complicated stuff involving moving vehicles.

"That was one of the trickier parts of the episode because it happens at the beginning and the end of the episode," cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra told Variety. "But the technology for camera support is incredible these days. We were using a Ronin gimbal, and we’re able to operate it remotely. We had a car with the operator ahead of our picture car as we were driving up. As they park, that car is in front of the picture car. It then has to disappear, because seconds later, we pull the gimbal off, and then we wrap around the car, and that led us into the rest of the episode."

“Oners are just so stupid,” says Renick's VP and often voice of reason Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz). “It’s just the director jacking off while making everyone else’s lives miserable. Audiences do not care about this shit.”

But when the results are as good as this, they often do. One of the joys of The Oner is watching how it's done, all in real-time. And the bit where they set up the studio boss in his own special digital village to quarantine him from the rest of the set? Pure gold...