Production Slate
A newcomer from Madrid, the titular character (Laia Costa) endures an adventurous and harrowing Berlin night in the feature Victoria.
I Single-Take Heist
By Patricia Thomson
“One city, one night, one take” is the tagline for Victoria,
which sums up the stunning tour de force by German director Sebas-
tian Schipper and Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth
Grøvlen, DFF. While this isn’t the first one-take film — 2002’s Russian
Ark (AC Jan. ’03) holds that honor — it is the first to bring such hard-
driving, spontaneous energy to this high-wire act.
Consider the magnitude: Two hours and 18 minutes of hand-
held camera, 22 locations, more than 150 extras managed by six
assistant directors, seven actors followed sequentially by three sound
teams, and the whole enterprise timed to end with the morning light.
We first meet Victoria’s title character (Laia Costa) dancing by
herself in an underground club. She’s a vivacious newcomer from
Madrid, open to making friends, and is soon adopted by a quartet of
rowdy rogues who say they’ll show her the “real” Berlin. The first
hour follows them from nightclub to city streets to a rooftop hangout
to the coffee bar where Victoria works. She and the friendliest of the
bunch, Sonne (Frederick Lau), hit it off, but their flirtation is inter-
rupted by his ex-con pal (Franz Rogowski), who has promised a
“favor” to the man who was his protector in jail (André Hennicke).
Victoria is sucked into duty as a driver for the ensuing bank robbery,
and the second half of the film follows them as they take the money
and run. This hour has several dramatic set pieces — in the getaway
car, celebrating at a nightclub, a police foot-chase, a hostage-taking
— as well as more intimate moments.
When Schipper got in touch with Grøvlen about the project,
20 November 2015 American Cinematographer
“I was intrigued, and a little skeptical,” says the cinematographer,
who’d met Schipper a year earlier while shooting Anders Morgen-
thaler’s The 11th Hour, in which Schipper acted alongside Kim
Victoria images courtesy of Adopt Films. Photo of Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, DFF by Roxy Reiss.
Basinger.
Potential funders were even more skeptical. To inspire confi-
dence, the Victoria cast and crew shot a one-take 10-minute short.
That calling card got them their funding, and it was also useful for
finding the right approach to Victoria’s camera movement. “Sturla
was already on top of his game, but I told him, ‘You can’t shoot
Victoria like this — you can’t anticipate actions,’” says Schipper.
Instead, the director suggested he think like a war photographer. “I
was to react to things happening around me, rather than have a
preconceived idea of where to look or what’s [in] the frame,” says
Grøvlen. “It was important to have the energy of ‘being in the now’
coming through the lens, rather than trying to create a specific
shot.”
When the four weeks of rehearsals began, there was no
script — just a 12-page treatment that was meant to be fleshed out
with the actors. The story was broken into 10 segments, which the
filmmakers immediately began rehearsing on camera with a full
crew. “In that process, we learned the language of the film,”
Grøvlen says. “The actors would improvise the theme, Sebastian
would correct them, and the story would develop. I learned the
rhythms of the actors, which helped me to read their body language
in order to move with them. I was very tapped into their energy;
when they were stressed, I got stressed, or when they were having
a quiet moment, I could relax. It went hand in hand, with their
energy coloring my work.” ➣

Top: Open to meeting new people, Victoria befriends Sonne (Frederick Lau), a roguish local.
Bottom: Victoria soon finds herself in a predicament.
Grøvlen also wandered the neigh-
borhood with his camera, getting to know
the lighting conditions and the ergonomics
of the Canon EOS C300 PL. “I did test the
Sony F3 and some sort of modified GoPro,
where you could have interchangeable
lenses,” he says. “But I was pretty confident
from the beginning that I would choose the
Canon C300 [because of the camera’s]
ergonomics and light sensitivity — and I like
the texture and image quality.”
Eschewing cables of any kind,
Grøvlen recorded onto a 32GB CF memory
card, which could hold two hours and 40
minutes using the MPEG-2 50 Mbps 4:2:2
codec. The C300 was outfitted with a Zeiss
Standard Speed 24mm T2.1 prime lens, and
a small matte box held a 1⁄8 Tiffen Black Pro-
Mist filter. The ISO was set to 2,000. The
camera sat inside a Redrock Micro
UltraCage, which held a monitor, micro-
phone, top handle, side handle and light-
weight Arri follow-focus. “That was basi-
22 November 2015
cally it,” says Grøvlen. “It weighed about
5.5 kilos.”
Handholding 12 pounds for 138
minutes is a challenge you have to experi-
ence to understand, and Grøvlen got a taste
during rehearsals. For the police chase —
which occurs well past the one-hour mark
— he was expected to run flat-out with the
actors. “The first time we rehearsed that, I
hadn’t warmed up, and after the first take,
I couldn’t move,” Grøvlen recalls with a
laugh. After that, his prep included physical
training: He took up running with a 5-kilo
weight, core strengthening, and half-hour
warm-ups before the full takes. “It was like
training for a marathon,” he says. The
fitness paid off. “Surprisingly, while I was
shooting [the full takes], I never thought,
‘I’m tired now. It’s not going to work.’ You
just focus on being there. But afterwards, I
was totally gone! I would get my massage
and sleep for 12 hours.”
For the several scenes inside a car,
American Cinematographer
they strapped a bungee to the roof, which
would allow the camera to dangle and give
Grøvlen a moment’s rest. “But I don’t think I
ended up using it,” he says. “I wouldn’t risk
anything getting caught in the roof of the
car when stepping in and out.” That caution
also extended to his own wardrobe, which
included shoes without laces and slim-fit
pants without pockets, so nothing could
snag.
When space permitted, focus puller
Boye Klüver dealt with aperture adjust-
ments, steered Grøvlen, and reminded him
to flip the internal ND filter as he passed
from interiors to exteriors. When space was
too cramped, like in the cars, elevator, apart-
ment and hotel room, Grøvlen had to fend
for himself.
All locations had to be lit for 360
degrees and, to lower the chances of crew
getting in frame, Grøvlen decided against
any kind of handheld lights or bounce
boards. “Some scenes are only with avail-
able light,” says gaffer Mirko Fricke. “We
[also] did some little things while the shot
was in progress. For instance, haze in the
garage, some adjustments in the hotel and
bank, and we had one lamp that was set
and removed within the take because other-
wise it would have been in the frame.”
The film’s biggest units were
deployed for the club exterior and subse-
quent walk-and-talk, when Victoria and the
boys get to know each other. For ambient
light, a 6K Par with spot lens was positioned
on a roof and bounced against the opposite
building, while a 5K sodium-vapor Fresnel
was hidden around the corner and directly lit

Cinematographer
Sturla Brandth
Grøvlen, DFF
lines up a shot.
the scene. On a more distant roof, Arri
M18s and M25s with ½ CTO gel provided
additional ambience and enhanced the
street lamps. Par 64s with various gels to
match specific lamp colors — including
sodium, CTB and a variety of greens —
were mounted on roofs to serve as street-
light extensions, with some boomed out
with 4-meter pipes. Fluorescent-lit bill-
boards were erected to provide background
highlights, while unwanted storefront lights
were scrimmed out.
The most elaborate interior setup
was the nightclub set, which was used
twice. It opens the film, with strobe effects
hitting Victoria’s face, and then serves as
revelry central when the group triumphantly
returns from the robbery. Built in an empty
basement, this was the only constructed
set, done for proximity’s sake. Two scanners
and four moving Mac 250 profile spots did
the yeoman’s work. “The moving lights
were used for the strobe effect because we
needed a longer flash time to provide a
clean effect in camera,” says Fricke. Adds
Grøvlen, “A strobe light would have created
artifacts in the form of half-exposed frames
because of the rolling shutter of the
camera.”
In addition, a large soft box faced the
DJ. “For his face, I used two Linestra halo-
gen light tubes,” Fricke notes. Both the DJ
and the crowd behind him were backlit with
gelled Par 56s — the DJ himself with a pair
of reds and the crowd with a pair of bluish-
greens and another of yellow-oranges.
“The whole dance floor was prepared with
a lot of Par 56s and Par 64s,” Fricke contin-
ues. “We had different colors on them for
the two different moods.” The biggest
difference in lighting between the gang’s
two visits to the club was a switch from a
stroboscopic effect to a cool bluish-green
24 November 2015
and hazy ambiance “to complement the
dawn,” Grøvlen explains.
The first time the production tried a
full take, it was as taxing as any robbery.
“The hopes were really high to nail it right
away,” says the director. The initial attempt
was technically successful, but otherwise fell
flat. “Everybody was holding back,” says
Schipper. “Nobody wanted to be the guy
that made the mistake.”
They took a week’s pause, then tried
again. Schipper encouraged the team to
embrace whatever happened and incorpo-
rate that into the story. But this second try
“top-sided in chaos,” Schipper says. He had
promised his funders a jump-cut version if
the one-take approach failed, but he could
tell that an edited version, culled from full
takes and filmed rehearsals, just wouldn’t
work. “It would probably qualify on some
level as a ‘product,’” he says, but that
wasn’t their goal.
Given the high stakes, their third and
final take was “supercharged,” says Schip-
per, who hung closer to the actors this time
around, slipping into the car off-camera and
being in their sphere during certain trouble
spots. This time, they pulled it off on all
fronts. “Actually, I felt it wasn’t the best
work I had done,” Grøvlen confesses. “But
after the last shot, when Victoria is walking
away and we’re about to cut, Sebastian
came over, put his hand on my shoulder and
said, ‘We got it.’ He was very clear: This had
the best performances, the best energy. And
I have to agree.”
That take also included some happy
accidents. The chaos that erupts in the
getaway car, for instance, was real. Costa
was driving too fast on unblocked streets, so
everyone was yelling at her to slow down.
What’s more, they tried a new, shorter
route, and the actress nearly turned down
American Cinematographer
the street where craft services was located.
The yelling intensified. “I could see it out of
the corner of my eye,” says Grøvlen, “so I
just panned the camera to Frederick Lau,
who was on the floor, and stayed on him for
a while. When we finally found the route
back to the club, everybody took a breath. It
was really authentic. That was something
that could have gone very wrong, but it
made everything so much better.”
Grøvlen’s proudest moment came
toward the end, when Victoria parts with
Sonne. “It came together perfectly,” he
recalls. “When I moved in close on her, a
tear was falling. In a normal shoot, we prob-
ably would have done that 20 times to get
it right, and here, after two hours of shoot-
ing, it was there. That was a magical
moment.”
Victoria’s color grade was done at
NHB Berlin on a FilmLight Baselight Two
(Generation V), with a DPX sequence
transcode in 1920x1080 24p and Rec 709
color space, for a final 2K DCP deliverable.
Grøvlen, producer Jan Dressler and colorist
Pana Argueta pursued a natural look to
enhance the “you are there” experience.
Argueta explains, “My main task, and the
most challenging part of my work, was to
enhance the changes in the light and the
color temperature as the characters were
moving throughout the locations,” he says.
“I had to use hundreds of key frames on the
Baselight — kind of like color dissolves
within scenes — to achieve the right mood
for every situation in the smoothest possible
way. I still get dizzy when I think about it.”
According to Grøvlen, another big
task was painting out the most obvious
camera shadows and crew reflections. They
also had one sky replacement. “Up on the
rooftop, we wanted dawn to start being visi-
ble, instead of looking into blackness.”
Overall, Grøvlen assures, “there wasn’t that
much trickery.” Just a lot of gumption.
TECHNICAL SPECS
2.39:1
Digital Capture
Canon EOS C300 PL
Zeiss Standard Speed
➣