How 'Kidding' turned a character's life around in one ingenious long take
Behind-the-scenes video shows cast and crew working with incredible speed and precision
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Your support makes all the difference.As long takes go, the one in this week's episode of Showtime’s Kidding wasn’t on the scale of True Detective‘s infamous six-minute raid tracking shot, but it still required an incredible level of coordination from cast and crew.
The scene in question centres on Shaina (Riki Lindhome), a drug addict who gets her life back on track after watching Mr Pickles’ Puppet Time, the children’s show of protagonist Jeff Piccirillo (Jim Carrey).
A behind-the-scenes video puts the edited scene side-by-side with an aerial shot of the apartment set, which starts out rundown, with bare plaster walls and barely any furniture.
Once Shaina’s ex-boyfriend leaves the apartment and the camera centres on her television set, the production team spring into action.
Lindhome is quickly given a new costume and the set is stripped of drug milieu. By the time the camera operator and his handheld camera rotate again, we find Shaina well on the way to recovery.
This process is repeated several times, with doubles standing in for Lindhome at times, props being added and removed at lightning speed (including the recurring television set itself) and entire walls sliding away to reveal new fixtures and fittings.
The communication and planning required to pull this off is quite staggering, not least from the camera operator who must make sure that none of the crew’s trickery ends up in the shot.
To top it off, the scene ends quite bravely with the introduction of its most unpredictable element: a dog.
Kidding airs in the US on Sunday nights on Showtime.
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