Everything that stands out about Netflix’s Adolescence – from the tense story to the incredible performances – can be boiled down to how the series was filmed. For director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis, the one-shot approach to filming was essential to highlight the performances and story, without cutting away from a single moment of tension.
“The process was that we were going to do this one-take series, which had never been done before,” says Barantini. Even while in the early talks of how Adolescence would come together, Barantini says he was already reaching out to Lewis to discuss the logistics of how it could be done. “On every job we’ve done, you and I have always been speaking very, very early on before prep even starts really, because it’s so important to do that.”
As frequent collaborators, Barantini knew that Lewis’ style of work would easily compliment his own. “You don’t think about the shots of the camera first, it’s always about story and performance and how’s the camera movement going to facilitate that,” says Barantini. “A prime example in Adolescence was we’d spoken really extensively about how we were going to do this.”
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Having worked on Boiling Point together, a feature filmed in the one-shot style, Lewis and Barantini had a starting point for how to plan a one-shot. “You’re starting from the ground up and one thing affects the next all the way through,” says Lewis. Since the planning can’t be written down in a way that is easily visualized by every department, Lewis opted to plan everything out on a map. “We had it all animated from a top down perspective, all the characters and all the camera moves basically almost all the way through all of the show.”
The story perspective may not be what every cinematographer focuses on with the camera, but that approach was essential for Lewis to film and plan the one-shot. “As you said, I think of camera moves very much from a story perspective, which is sometimes a curse on other jobs… but it really works well for a oner to understand why the camera’s doing what it’s doing,” says Lewis. “You come in well informed and then that helps to springboard everything else that’s happening on the day of rehearsals.”
One of the most difficult scenes to film in the series was a drone shot over the murder scene, though not necessarily for lack of planning. “The plan was to take the drone off, fly over the murder site, we see the murder site and we just continue to flying over it,” says Barantini. The plan changed when one of the Netflix executives suggested to land the drone to so they could film Stephen Graham putting flowers down at the site, which couldn’t be seen if it was flying over.
“We didn’t have much time to act on it. It was very much like, we’re either going to do it or not do it,” says Lewis. After getting the go-ahead from the drone team, working out the video feed for landing and setting everything else up, Lewis and his team were able to solve the puzzle. “I come in underneath the drone, we unclip it, and then I walk into Stephen’s closeup at the end, which is fine… unless there’s gale force winds due for the next two days of a shoot.”
Luckily, the team was able to pull off the shot, even amidst the high-speed winds. “It’s a testament to the technical teams, because honestly we had to redesign that whole system so that people were jumping on a new tracking vehicle that had to follow down the road underneath the drone,” says Lewis. “We were actually in the shot, the white mini bus that’s there is going into the car park to land the drone catcher.”
Click the video above to watch the full discussion.