Atonement: Steadicam Sequence

I know Atonement's not a thriller in any way whatsoever (one of my favourite films though), but the camera work in the following sequence is so cool and I thought I'd quickly blog something about it.




The camera tilts down from the top of a ship (on land) to the main character of the film (Robbie, played by James McAvoy). Then the steadicam movement kicks in and the camera starts to follow Robbie as he walks along the shore. Robbie then walks out of frame, and the camera continues to move without following him. The audience then begin to get a sense of the surrounding as the camera moves around the scene. The whole sequence is just one long take, so there's not really much edited together. The sequence is fairly slow-paced because of this one take, and this works really well in taking the audience away from the story for a minute, just to give them an overview of the location. From earlier on in the film, the audience is shown that this part of the film is set during the time of World War Two (the mise-en-scene and character dress codes all indicate this). So, this whole sequence is used to show the consequences of war. Then at the end, the audience is brought back to Robbie, and the narrative continues.

The clip above is just a part of the 4 and a half minute long steadicam sequence.