Continuing our voyage of exploration of the Best of 2014, today we’re taking a look at the smallest of filmic building blocks —the single shot. If you consider the hundreds of thousands of shots that make up the sum total of feature films released in a year, it’s a daunting task, but one that then becomes quite simple (if immensely subjective) if we insist on one simple parameter: it had to be a single shot, no cuts, that stayed with us long after we finished watching the film.
However this year, for one reason that some of you have probably guessed, the debate about how we actually define “a shot” loomed large. And as with our popular 20 Greatest Long Takes feature from earlier in the year, we came down on the side of what the audience sees rather than how it is made. That is, many of these shots were not achieved in camera in a single take, but are composites of various takes or plates or other CGI wizardry. It’s becoming hard to tell where shot footage ends and post...
