Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: Adolescence, Stephen Graham, Netflix, TV and Film
Joe Harker
If you've been watching Adolescence on Netflix, then you might be wondering how they managed to put together the critically acclaimed drama.
The series stars Stephen Graham (who also co-created and co-wrote the show with Jack Thorne) as a dad who becomes the 'appropriate adult' for his son (Owen Cooper) after police batters down their door and arrests the boy on suspicion of murder.
Adolescence is only four episodes long, but each one is a marvel in filming and direction, as they're all done in one take.
In case you were wondering whether the Netflix series finds ways to conceal cuts and secretly chop up the action without the viewer noticing, à la 1917, they really didn't.
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Everything you see in an episode is all done in the same take, as the camera crew worked out how to keep everything together and passed the camera between them to make sure it followed the action.
For one sequence, they had to fix the camera to a drone so it could fly up into the sky, then when it came back down, they took it and used it for a close up of Stephen Graham's face.
While everything we see was really done in one take, it did take a bunch of takes to get what we actually got to watch on screen.
Netflix had planned to film 10 takes of each episode of Adolescence, but they ended up filming more and the streaming platform revealed which take audiences got to see.
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While the second take of the first episode is the one we got to see, takes 13, 11, and 16 of the subsequent episodes were the ones which made it onto the broadcast and all culminated in an emotional ending.
Plenty of viewers wondered what would happen to a take of Adolescence if some of the actors got something wrong, as on social media Netflix answered a bunch of the common questions people had about the show.
"It depends on the size of the mistake – in some instances they carried on, but often takes were completely abandoned. No pressure!" was their answer for what they'd do if a mistake was made.
They said that 'in reality a few attempts had to be abandoned and restarted' so they went over the planned 10 takes, which had been scheduled to be filmed once in the morning and once in the afternoon through five days of filming.
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Fortunately, a lot of planning went into Adolescence and in some cases the production crew stayed on the set dressed as extras so they could stick with what was going on.
Filming it all in one take does come with some risks, as while chatting to Chris Moyles on Radio X, Stephen Graham and his wife Hannah Walters (an executive producer on Adolescence) revealed that it could be difficult if actors addressed each other by the wrong name and blew a take.
Adolescence is available to stream now on Netflix.