Was “Adolescence” really shot in one take? Looking under the hood of Netflix's stunning new series

Key Points

• Adolescence tells the story of a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a female classmate, touching on timely themes like bullying and online radicalization.

• Each of the series' four episodes unfolds in a single, unbroken take that immerses viewers in the story and creates high tension.

• Filming each episode required three weeks of intense rehearsal, technical wizardry, and intricate choreography that actors likened to a theatre production.

Adolescence isn't just an emotional marvel, but a technical one as well.

The timely Netflix series centers around a 13-year-old boy, Jamie (Owen Cooper), who's arrested for the murder of a female classmate. It's told over four episodes, each of which unfolds in real time. In an effort to capture chaos, immediacy, and realism, the showrunners sought to create an unbroken visual experience with no cutaways. The result is bracing and intimate, sometimes uncomfortably so.

Surely, though, this was accomplished through clever editing, right? After all, that's what Alejandro González Iñárritu did with 2015's Birdman, a "one-take" film that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Well, believe it or not, each of Adolescence's four episodes was filmed in a single, unbroken take.

Related: Adolescence ending explained: Unpacking whether Jamie killed Katie (and how the series is a warning to parents)

“There’s no stitching of takes together," cinematographer Matthew Lewis told Variety. "It was one entire shot, whether I wanted it to be or not."

So, how was Adolescence shot in one take? How much preparation did it take? And how many times did they need to do it before getting it right? Read on for these answers and more.

How was Adolescence shot?

In a behind-the-scenes look at Adolescence, the cast and crew broke down the filming process, revealing that each episode was allotted three weeks for production.

The first week was about walking through the episode "scene by scene," per actor Ashley Walters. Director Philip Barantini adds that the performers rehearsed each scene until it became "muscle memory."

During the next week, the technical crew entered the picture. Speaking with Variety, Lewis likened the process of staging each episode, mapping transitions, and masking the crew to moving around puzzle pieces. "It’s a lot of planning. You can’t do a shot list, so we didn’t have one," he said. "We mapped the area we were using and looked at how the camera would move within it, and we rehearsed it like a dance, between me and the cast."

Barantini elaborated in an interview with Screen Daily. "We had to plan way more in advance than you would do with a conventional show because the actors need to rehearse in the spaces and we need to know exactly where the camera can go," he said. "Me and [Lewis] had models of the police station and we used little figures and a little camera to map it out. When they were still building the studio but the walls were up, we would go down after everyone had gone home. Matt would have his iPad and then I’d play all the characters and we’d just be walking around and be like, 'Right we can’t go in that door, let’s try this one.'"

Furthermore, Lewis said, rewrites were often necessary to suit the location and choreography. This resulted in screenwriter Jack Thorne reworking his original scripts to add motivation for movements necessitated by the technical demands.

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The final week was about bringing all the elements together to shoot the episode. "Before each take my heart is pounding, absolutely everyone feels it because everyone knows how important their job is," Lewis says in the Adolescence making-of documentary.

Barantini adds, "There's not one person on that set who's not important."

Why was Adolescence filmed in one take?

Impressive as they can be, single-shot media can run the risk of coming off as a gimmick. The creators of Adolescence, though, came to the project with intention.

"With Adolescence, I wanted the audience to go on an immersive journey that unfolds in real time just as it’s unfolding for the actors in real time," Barantini said in a recent interview. "[The single-take] creates a tension and forces a perspective on the audience to where they can’t look away, even if they feel anxious or awkward. [The one-shot] doesn’t lend itself to all genres, but for this show, we wanted to dip the audience in for an hour, and we pull them out. The next time, it’s a few days later or 13 months later, and it’s up to the audience to figure things out for themselves."

Several of the actors likened the experience of filming Adolescence to acting in a theatrical play. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stephen Graham, the series' co-creator and co-writer who also plays Eddie, described the project as a "marriage" of theater and TV.

"We have to work out how to move around the table and where because it has to be seamless and continuous," he said. "It’s just such a wonderful process, but it is the most zen as an actor I’ve ever been. You are in that character from the moment we say ‘action’ and start until the moment we say ‘cut’ and finish.”

What camera was used to film Adolescence?

Lewis told Variety that they shot Adolescence on the DJI Ronin 4D camera. "It had its limitations, but in the ways we needed it to work: being a small gimbal that you could pass between operators, one that you can hold out in front of you without having to attach it to a person, and at the click of a button, you can go handheld, or click it onto a drone," he said.

In the making-of documentary, you can see the camera used in a variety of ways, including being hitched to a drone and locked onto a crane attached to a car.

How many takes did each episode of Adolescence take?

As Barantini explained, the plan was to do 10 takes of each episode — two a day for five days. That didn't always turn out to be the case, though. "Sometimes we’d have to stop and go again, and that was one take, so for some episodes we did up to 16 takes," he told Screen Daily.

During a Q&A on X (formerly Twitter), Netflix revealed that episode 1 is the second take, episode 2 is the 13th take, episode 3 is the 11th take, and episode 4 is the 16th take.

How did they shoot the Adolescence episode 2 ending?

Adolescence's breathtaking second episode ending sees the camera taking flight outside Jamie's school, soaring over the town, and touching down in the lot where Katie was killed. There, we see Eddie laying flowers at her memorial. This was accomplished without disrupting the shot.

The intricately choreographed sequence was accomplished by gently hooking the camera to a drone. "It was a last-minute request from the execs," Lewis told Variety. "We were originally going to take off and fly and stay up in the air, but they thought it would be a nice beat to go back and find Stephen Graham at the end of the scene, so we had a couple of days to work that out, but we got it."

Thorne discussed the shot in Netflix's making-of documentary. "It was an example of the technical meeting the story and finding a fusion, which is actually better than anything that the story had come up with on its own," he says.

Where can I watch Adolescence?

All four episodes of Adolescence are streaming on Netflix.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly