Deconstructing There Will Be Blood's 678 Shots Anonymous College

When learning how a film is put together, one of the first things to do is get a pen and paper and count the shots. It's not very technical and a bit tedious as well. Tallying every time there are cuts forces the viewer to see things differently. It kills the illusion just enough that the nuts and bolts start to come into view. In the film There Will be Blood by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, by the third shot, you notice a camera technique that would be used again and again throughout the film. This heavy emphasis on double and triple framing in single shots. Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit were clearly interested in making a movie composed largely of long takes. They, however, keep up the momentum by collapsing multiple shots into one. Things never drag on or get too boring which is definitely a consideration when your movie is two and a half hours long. In fact by the end of the fourteen and a half minute, dialogue-free introduction, what stuck out was the length of the shots and by how few there actually were, 73 to be exact. That means that each shot on average was about 12 seconds long. That's a really long average shot length by today's standard. In something unexpected for Anderson to keep up throughout the...