ONE SHOT WONDER

“IT WAS CRITICAL THAT WHATEVER WE DID TO ASSEMBLE AND CONNECT THE SHOTS TOGETHER NEVER BETRAYED THE CAMERA WORK”
Guillaume Rocheron, production VFX supervisor

In order to honour the stories told by his grandfather about being a soldier during World War I and immerse the audience in the experience, filmmaker Sam Mendes (Skyfall) decided to follow the mission of British lance corporals Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and William Schofield (George MacKay) to call off an attack through war-torn France as if it was a single shot. The concept led to a rethinking of the traditional way of tackling visual effects, which are normally divided by shots and sequences. The post-production period for 1917 lasted 17 weeks with digital augmented imagery encompassing 91 per cent of the theatrical runtime.

“Visual effects pipelines are not good at handling shots that are over 500 frames, which is a 20-second shot,” notes production VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron (). “On this movie we had some takes that were seven minutes long and others that were a couple of seconds. One thing that we realised quickly is that shots can’t be defined by cutting from one to the other because the shot count becomes too