How Loki’s Lamentis One Shot Scene Was Filmed (How Many Cuts It Had)

Loki episode 3, “Lamentis,” finishes with a desperate dash as Loki and Sylvie try to reach the last ship leaving the doomed moon of Lamentis-1. Behind-the-scenes documentary Marvel Studios: Assembled reveals just how much work went into making this scene look like a single, unbroken take.

As Marvel Studios’ Phase Four movies were pushed back due to worldwide theater closures, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s new collection of TV shows forged ahead. Loki follows WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as the third of these shows, which set the stage for the upcoming MCU movies in some interesting ways. Loki follows a “variant” of the God of Mischief created by the events of Avengers: Endgame, who becomes entangled in the powerful and mysterious Time Variance Authority and ends up falling for a female version of himself, Sylvie.

In “Lamentis,” Loki has followed Sylvie to one of her favorite hiding spots: an apocalypse, where the imminent destruction of everything around cloaks her aberrant time footprint from the TVA’s systems. When their TemPad is broken, the two variants find themselves trapped on the moon Lamentis-1, which will be destroyed in a matter of hours by the fracturing planet of Lamentis. In Marvel Studios: Assembled, Loki cinematographer Autumn Durald explains that she began planning the “oner” sequence with director Kate Herron around a year before it was actually filmed. Loki actor Tom Hiddleston estimates that there are around eight or nine “stitches” in the scene, where shots from different takes are matched so that they can be edited into a single seamless sequence.

The cuts in the Lamentis one-shot sequence are usually hidden when someone runs in front of the camera, when the camera moves past a large object in the foreground, or when the camera pans up to look at the destruction created in VFX. The illusion is helped along by the chaos of the scene, which has many people running around and moments when things are obscured by smoke or dust. Similar techniques were used to stitch together shots for Sam Mendes’ war movie 1917 and Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu’s Birdman, both of which create the impression of being filmed in a single take through the use of hidden cuts.

Despite the movie magic involved, the “Lamentis” ending sequence was still very challenging from a production perspective. The way that the camera circled Sylvie and Loki meant that the set had to be able to filmed in a 360 degree circle, while also being economical (“a big part of it was not building any more set than we need“). Between the otherworldly set and the visual effects of Lamentis cracking down the middle and the Ark being destroyed, “Lamentis” saves its most impressive scene for last. As Hiddleston says in Assembled, “[the episode] finishes at the end of this extraordinary piece of action.”

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Hannah Shaw-Williams
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