Long takes aren't really long — they're stitched. A look at the standard handoff points and what they cost on set.
12 min read · 2026-05-09Drop height, decelleration distance, and the boring spreadsheet every stunt coordinator runs before the talent climbs up.
8 min read · 2026-04-27Why most modern action edits average just under a second per cut — and the directors who deliberately break the rule.
10 min read · 2026-04-14The two-shot rhythm you see in nearly every Hong Kong-influenced fight scene since the late 90s, with examples.
7 min read · 2026-03-30fight-scene-notes-template.mdMarkdown template I use when taking shot-by-shot notes during rewatches.
shot-extractor.shBash helper that pulls per-second frames out of a clip with ffmpeg. Useful for annotating cuts.
scene-log.csvMy ongoing spreadsheet of action sequences I've broken down — runtime, cut count, choreographer.
stunt-glossary.txtPlain-text glossary of stunt-department terminology I keep referring back to.
The "single take" in the warehouse scene I was using as an example actually has a hidden cut behind the pillar at 1:24 — embarrassing miss. Fixed the timestamp and added a note crediting the catch. Lesson: zoom in on every pillar, doorway, and pan-past-a-wall before claiming anything is unbroken.
Tried the privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com variant for a few weeks but kept getting reports of the player not loading on older mobile browsers. Rolled back. Will revisit if I ever move off shared hosting.
Was sitting in a private gist; figured it was more useful in the downloads list. Columns are reasonably stable but the "shot count" field is hand-counted and almost certainly off by one or two on the longer entries.