The techniques used to pull off hidden cuts have been around for almost 70 years and started with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 movie Rope. Critics admired this new method of film making.

By having no visible edits, the movie appears to be playing in real time. The cameras at the time had to find a way to hide cuts when they changed film rolls, so they came up with four main tricks: color match, foreground object, motion blur and the Texas switch.

A recent example of the one-take technique can be seen in Academy Award winner 1917 where director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins used these tricks to make the movie look like it was filmed in one take.