Long Take from *The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn* (2011)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Movie Title: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (The Adventures of Tintin)
Year: 2011
Director: Steven Spielberg
Producer: Peter Jackson
Country: United States / New Zealand
Screenwriters: Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish
Cinematography Consultant: Janusz Kamiński (longtime collaborator of Spielberg—lighting consultant for Weta)
VFX / Animation: Weta Digital (Wellington, New Zealand) — the studio's first fully animated feature film
Senior VFX Supervisor: Joe Letteri
VFX Supervisors: Matt Aitken, Wayne Stables
Performance capture: filming at Giant Studios, Playa Vista, Los Angeles (the same set as *Avatar*)
Software: Autodesk Maya (3D environments), Autodesk MotionBuilder (real-time motion capture)
Camera: virtual camera—a physical controller held by Spielberg that displays the CG characters in their environments in real time
Length of the scene: 2 minutes 33 seconds (81st minute of the film)
Total filming time (motion capture): 32 days
Post-production: supervised by Peter Jackson in Wellington; Spielberg via daily videoconferences
Budget: ~$135 million
Bagghar. A fictional Moroccan port city, perched on a hill, bathed in sunlight and bursting with color. Sakharine’s falcon (Daniel Craig) has just stolen the scrolls. Tintin (Jamie Bell) jumps on a motorcycle, with Haddock (Andy Serkis) behind him and Snowy running beneath them. The chase begins, and the camera doesn’t cut. For two minutes and thirty-three seconds, it follows the motorcycle as it hurtles down the hill, dives into the city’s alleyways, passes under arches, leaps over rooftops, and weaves through market stalls. Haddock fires a rocket launcher and accidentally hits a dam, causing a river to flood the streets of a desert town, turning the chase into an aquatic Rube Goldberg machine. The camera shifts from one character to another—from Tintin to Sakharine, from Snowy to the falcon, from power lines to waves crashing with impossible movements—passing through walls, following the rope of a lasso from inside the loop, diving underwater and resurfacing, climbing up the side of a building, and then diving back down toward the motorcycle. Nothing you see is real. Not the characters, not the city, not the camera. And yet, everything is filmed as if it were live-action.
Why This Scene Is a Cult Classic
Spielberg said the one line that sums it all up: “I wanted to shoot this chase in a single take.” Not because the continuous shot added realism—nothing in this sequence is realistic. Not because it created tension—the scene is more exhilarating than stressful. But because, for the first time in his career, the camera could do absolutely anything. No walls, no gravity, no crane budget, no physical constraints. The virtual camera that Spielberg held in his hands on the motion-capture set was a window onto a world where the laws of cinematography no longer apply. And the long take is the purest demonstration of this freedom: an uninterrupted movement that traverses spaces no real camera could traverse, at speeds no Steadicam operator could achieve, with changes in axis that no cinematographer could execute.
The result is paradoxical. Brad Stevens, writing in *Sight & Sound*, noted that the shot “revels in its status as a digital creation”; it’s amusing precisely because we know it would have been impossible to film with a real camera. And yet, Spielberg treats the scene exactly as if he were filming a live-action chase: with well-chosen angles, a clear spatial layout, and visual gags that arise from the characters’ actions (the rocket hitting the dam, the water flooding the streets). He is a live-action director who uses the tools of animation to make films—not animation itself.
How They Filmed It
James Cameron got the ball rolling. While Spielberg and Jackson were still on the fence about the technology, Cameron invited them to the set of *Avatar* to show them the performance capture process using the virtual camera. Spielberg held the camera, watched the Na'vi move in real time on the screen, and was convinced. Cameron even offered to set up a test set for them for a few days. The result: a week of exploratory filming in November 2006 in Playa Vista, Los Angeles—the same set as *Avatar*—with Andy Serkis as Haddock and Peter Jackson providing the voice for Tintin. The footage was sent to Weta Digital, which produced a 20-minute test featuring photorealistic characters.
Principal photography lasted 32 days in 2009. The actors wore performance-capture suits with helmets equipped with front-facing cameras to record their facial expressions. Spielberg described the experience: “It’s always a little intimidating to see yourself dressed up like Mike Nelson from *Sea Hunt*. They’re wearing these capture suits, they have markers on their faces, and those helmets with a built-in camera and light. It takes a moment not to burst out laughing during a serious dialogue with an actor who looks like a scuba diver.”
The virtual camera—a physical controller held by Spielberg—displayed the CG characters in their digital environments in real time. For the first time, Spielberg served as his own cinematographer, director of photography, and lighting consultant. He said, “In every film I made up until *Tintin*, I always kept one eye closed while framing a shot, because I wanted to see the film in 2D, just like the audience. On *Tintin*, I have both eyes open.”
For the Bagghar sequence specifically, pre-visualization was at the heart of the process. Weta’s pre-visualization team, led by Jamie Beard, constructed the sequence as a series of action beats, which were presented to Spielberg and Jackson during review sessions. Spielberg described these sessions as “among the most creative moments he had ever experienced on a film.” Matt Aitken explained: “For action sequences like the chase through the streets of Bagghar, it was pre-visualization that determined the overall layout of the environment to support the action.”
The town of Bagghar itself is entirely 3D—not a single matte painting. Wayne Stables explained the process: “We built the elements as components—seven basic buildings, then awnings, staircases, and fountains—using different color palettes. Then we use our layout tools to assemble them.” Every sheet of paper, every basket of fruit, every piece of fabric in the market is a unique digital asset, all managed by Weta’s proprietary inventory system, without which the complexity would have been “impossible to manage.”
Weta also developed a new digital hairstyling software called "Barbershop" for the film, which won an Academy Sci-Tech Award in 2015. *Tintin* was the studio's first fully animated feature film; until then, Weta had only created visual effects for live-action films (*The Lord of the Rings*, *King Kong*, *Avatar*).
What to Look For When Watching It Again
The foreground/background interaction (the entire shot): While Tintin chases Sakharine in the foreground, the water from the dam is destroying the city in the background. Brad Stevens (Sight & Sound) noted that this simultaneous handling of the main action and secondary visual gags is “truly impressive”—it’s pure Spielberg, the same spatial mastery as in *Raiders of the Lost Ark*, but without any physical constraints.
Impossible Transitions (~the entire shot) Count the moments when the camera makes a physically impossible movement: passing through a wall, moving from an interior to an exterior without a cut, diving underwater and emerging again. Each transition is a reminder that this camera doesn't exist—and that this is precisely what makes the shot possible.
The Resolution of the Three MacGuffins (~End of Take) SlashFilm noted that Spielberg bases the entire sequence on three separate scrolls, each of which changes hands at different times. The long take forces you to follow all three simultaneously—a feat of narrative clarity that conventional editing would have made simpler but less dizzying.
Did you know?
Hergé and Spielberg admired each other without ever meeting. Spielberg discovered Tintin thanks to a French review of *Raiders of the Lost Ark* that compared Indiana Jones to the Belgian reporter. Before his death in 1983, Hergé told his wife, “This Tintin will undoubtedly be different, but it will be a good Tintin.” Spielberg acquired the rights after Hergé’s death and held onto them for 28 years before making the film.
The Bagghar sequence is the freest and most paradoxical long take in this collection. All the other shots on the set exist within the tension between what the filmmaker wants to show and what physics allows him to film. The Doggicam rig in *Children of Men* exists because a car is too small for a camera. The lightbox in *Gravity* exists because there is no gravity in space. The Steadicam in *Creed* exists because a boxing ring is an enclosed space. Every long take in the collection is a victory of human engineering over a physical constraint. Bagghar is the only shot where no such constraint exists. The camera can do anything. And the question posed by the shot—the question posed by Brad Stevens in *Sight & Sound*—is: when anything is possible, what remains impressive?
Spielberg's answer: clarity. In a shot where the camera could do anything, he chooses to do exactly what a great live-action director would do: clear angles, coherent spatial relationships, and visual gags that arise from the characters’ actions. This is the most counterintuitive lesson in this collection: the technically freest long take is also the most disciplined.
Sources
Steven Spielberg - Animation World Network, "Spielberg Talks Tintin" (December 2011)
Matt Aitken, VFX Supervisor — The Art of VFX, "The Adventures of Tintin" (2012)
Wayne Stables, VFX Supervisor - fxguide, "Tintin: Weta Goes Animated" (December 2011)
Joe Letteri, Senior VFX Supervisor - NBC San Diego, "Behind the Pixels of The Adventures of Tintin's Dazzling Digital World" (May 2012)
Brad Stevens - BFI Sight & Sound, "Faking the Long Take" (2019)
SlashFilm - "That One-Shot Chase Scene in Steven Spielberg's *The Adventures of Tintin* Is the Best Action Scene Ever" (January 2023)
The Hollywood Reporter - "The Adventures of Tintin: What James Cameron Showed Spielberg and Jackson" (October 2011)
Autodesk / Weta Digital - press release, "Weta Digital's Groundbreaking Animation Powered by Autodesk Technology" (February 2012)
Screen Insight - Analysis of the Bagghar sequence (October 2011)
Wikipedia - The Adventures of Tintin (movie)
