That's odd. I thought for sure this was about Russian Ark, a 96 minute film shot in one take in the Hermitage.

While 5 hrs is indeed longer, the huge casting and choreograohy involved in Russian Ark seemed like it was fairly challenging.
posted by vacapinta at 5:49 AM on March 10, 2020 [14 favorites]

I thought of Russian Ark as well - which is a much more involved affair. One shot films are a funny subgenre - this is the IMDB list of all one shot films they know (I'm not sure but I'm missing something there).
posted by mathiu at 6:11 AM on March 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

The trailer admits that "additional software and hardware" were used, which I took to mean "a huge-ass external battery pack." Not that it diminishes the piece! I can't wait to watch this at home on a big TV screen.

And thank you for pointing out "Russian Ark" -- I'd never heard of that, either. Yay!
posted by wenestvedt at 6:14 AM on March 10, 2020

Well it's the whole twist of the trailer that it's shot on one battery charge (and that 19% charge were left at the end of the take) - so I hope that rules out battery packs. I thought they were referring to the Steadycam rig and focus pulling equipment they probably had hooked up to a comparatively tiny iPhone in the middle of it all (and maybe external storage?) + lighting...
posted by mathiu at 6:22 AM on March 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

I got about 12 minutes in before becoming extremely annoyed at the people in the way of the architecture and art. Very distracting.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:07 AM on March 10, 2020

This is really beautiful, thank you for posting it! The Hermitage is completely breathtaking, and the most endless museum I've been in. The things that are missing from the video are that they open the windows when its warm and the white silk curtains move like they are underwater, and the wood floors are pockmarked with tiny stilleto scars. I went down like three basements and past office spaces and down long poorly lit hallways I was sure I wasn't supposed to, but then there were rooms of figurative leather work and an entire ancient carriage and the oldest carpet in the world. The cats come out to the square in the evening for attention as the museum is closing.
posted by velebita at 8:29 AM on March 10, 2020 [9 favorites]

Five hours isn't enough. I spent a day and a half there and felt that I had only seen about 80% of the things on exhibit.
posted by Xoc at 11:31 AM on March 10, 2020

Love this. I just aquired a 1968 book, 'сокровища эрмитжа'. I love Soviet era books. The Hermitage would be in the top 3 places I'd like to visit.
posted by clavdivs at 11:58 AM on March 10, 2020

While 5 hrs is indeed longer, the huge casting and choreograohy involved in Russian Ark seemed like it was fairly challenging.

The DVD of Russian Ark has a "behind the scenes" short about the production. It's on YouTube as well. I highly recommend it, it's as tense as a thriller. The Armitage Museum gave the production crew just one day to shoot. The Steadicam operator was a veteran German cameraman, who was worried about carrying the camera for so long...this was a film camera, of course, a massive object. At one point the camera moves outside, in the Russian winter, then moves back inside, so it was a challenge to not have the lens fog up at that point. The movie is something like the 2nd or 3rd take...it was their last chance, and if there had been a mistake, the production would've stopped.
posted by zardoz at 3:22 PM on March 10, 2020

Russian Ark is a film. This is footage.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:01 PM on March 10, 2020 [5 favorites]