Year : 2018
Episode: Season 1, Episode 3 - "Every Pain Needs a Name"
Episode Director: Jake Schreier (Robot & Frank)
Showrunner / Creator: Dave Holstein
Executive Producer: Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind)
Country: United States (Showtime)
Director of Photography: Shawn Kim (regular collaborator of Gondry - music videos for Björk, Radiohead, The Chemical Brothers)
Production designer: Maxwell Orgell (a regular collaborator of Gondry)
Shot actress: Riki Lindhome (Garfunkel and Oates, Knives Out)
Shot duration: 1 minute 42 seconds (reduced from 3 minutes to 1 minute 42 seconds during choreography editing)
Method: TRUE single continuous shot - set physically transformed in real time by 50 technicians
Preparation: 2 weeks of planning + 1 full Saturday of choreographing the plan
Team in the plan: 50 people (technicians, prop masters, stagehands)
Setting: a square apartment built with pivoting walls, designed specifically for this layout
VFX: none - everything is practical, real-time
Making-of: BTS split-screen video published by Showtime (October 2018)
A shabby apartment. Shaina (Riki Lindhome) lies on an unmade bed, her face streaked with cocaine. On TV, Mr. Pickles (Jim Carrey) talks about being "her true self." The camera slowly pans around the room. And when it returns to Shaina, everything has changed. The apartment is cleaner. The pipes and bottles are gone. Shaina is exercising. The camera keeps rolling. The apartment transforms again: new furniture, new colors, friends arriving, a birthday cake. Five years of life in one minute and forty-two seconds. Five years of transformation, from a drug addict at rock bottom to a woman standing tall, filmed in a single continuous shot, without cuts, without VFX, without editing. Just a camera rolling and 50 technicians changing the world behind it.
Why this scene is iconic
Shawn Kim, the cinematographer, laid down the golden rule: "Every shot like this, no matter how spectacular or how much attention it receives, must serve a narrative purpose or it's ridiculous." And the narrative purpose here is time. Shaina is a woman undergoing a life change. Traditional editing would have shown this in three shots: before, during, after. The continuous shot shows it in a single breath, the change as a flow, not a series of jumps. You don't see a woman who has changed. You see a woman in the process of changing.
What makes this shot unique in the entire collection is that it's not a long take of action, combat, battle, chase, or mourning. It's a long take of transformation. The camera doesn't follow a character through space; it revolves around a character through time. It's the cinematic version of a time-lapse, except that time doesn't accelerate; it's the world that changes around a woman who remains at the center of the frame.
And then there's the shadow of Gondry. The episode wasn't directed by Michel Gondry; it was directed by Jake Schreier. But Holstein, the showrunner, had given a directive: write something "very Gondry-esque" in each episode. And Gondry himself had the idea of shooting this scene in a single take. Schreier: "I grew up watching his music videos. I knew what he was looking for. We were conceiving a time-lapse tribute to Gondry." The director of photography (Shawn Kim) and the production designer (Maxwell Orgell) are regular collaborators of Gondry's; they know his visual language inside and out. The result is a shot that reeks of Gondry in every camera movement, in every set transformation, in every handcrafted detail, even though Gondry wasn't behind the camera.
How they filmed it
The apartment was designed from scratch by Maxwell Orgell for this unique shot. The square shape was chosen because it naturally lends itself to circular panning; the camera rotates around the center of the room and returns to each wall at regular intervals. The walls were pivoting, allowing technicians to move around while changing the set while the camera focused elsewhere.
Orgell described the design process: "We started by thinking about what kinds of spaces would be best suited to this transformation." The question guiding every decision was: "What changes the world the most, and how do we make that work?" The solutions were ingenious and economical. Instead of removing an old carpet and bringing in a new one, which would have taken too long, the team stacked the old carpet on top of the new one. When the camera panned to the other side, a technician would rip off the old carpet in a second, revealing the new one underneath. The same principle applied to props: "dirty" objects (pipes, bottles, ashtrays) were removed from one side of the room while "clean" objects (candles, books, plants) were placed on the other side, all in real time, out of the camera's view.
Fifty technicians were working simultaneously in and around the apartment. The behind-the-scenes video released by Showtime, a vertical split-screen showing what the camera sees on the left and the backstage chaos on the right, went viral. It shows stagehands tearing down curtains, prop masters setting down objects, and wardrobe assistants changing Lindhome's costume in seconds, all while the panoramic camera films.
Holstein detailed the figures: "We spent an entire Saturday choreographing that one shot. We cut it from 3 minutes to 1 minute 42 seconds. It involved 50 crew members, a specially constructed set with rotating walls, and it's just this continuous shot of a woman over five years going from drug addict to a better person."
Schreier was particularly impressed by Lindhome: "Look how confident she is, she shouts that she's ready long before she's finished getting dressed." Lindhome had to coordinate her movements with the camera; with each pan, she changed position, costume, expression, and physical posture to represent a different stage of her life. If she was half a second late, the camera would reach her before she was ready. If she was early, she had to hold the pose in mid-air.
Jim Carrey wasn't in the scene, but he came to the set to watch. Holstein: "It's the kind of shot that requires so much work from so many people. When it's pulled off, everyone feels like they were part of it."
What to observe when reviewing it
The TV (anchor point, the entire shot) The TV showing Mr. Pickles is the anchor point of the shot. The camera returns to it with each rotation; it's your spatial reference point. And it's also the narrative engine: it was Mr. Pickles that inspired Shaina to change her life. The TV never changes. Everything else around it changes.
Lindhome's Costume Changes (~each rotation): Every time the camera returns to Shaina, she's wearing a different costume. The dressers change her in seconds, off-screen, while the camera pans across the walls. Pay close attention to the timing: sometimes she shouts "Ready!" before the last button is even fastened.
The carpet (first transformation): An old, stained carpet is torn up to reveal a new one underneath. This is the simplest and cleverest trick in the plan; instead of replacing, you stack and tear.
Did you know that?
Michel Gondry has built his entire music video career on this principle: transforming the world in real time in front of the camera, without CGI, without editing, using cardboard, glue, and ingenuity. The video for "Star Guitar" by The Chemical Brothers (2002), featuring a train whose landscape pulses in time with the music, is the most famous example. Shawn Kim directed most of these videos. Maxwell Orgell designed the sets for several of them. The shot in Kidding is their Gondry DNA compressed into 1 minute and 42 seconds, except this time it serves a character, not a piece of music.
This shot is unique in the site's collection because it reverses the usual logic of the long take. In all the other films— Children of Men, Atomic Blonde, Extraction, Creed—the camera follows a character through space. Here, the camera remains in the same place, and it is time that moves. The camera rotates on its axis like the hands of a clock, and with each rotation, months have passed. It's the long take as a time machine. Not the scientific machine of Tenet, but Gondry's handcrafted machine, made of stacked carpets, rotating walls, and 50 technicians running around.
The closest similar shot in this collection is the past/present transition in The Haunting of Hill House S1E6, where the adult actors sprint out of frame during a 360° turn so the children can take their places. Same principle: time changes while the camera is rolling. But Hill House uses the trick for grief. Kidding uses it for hope.
Sources
Dave Holstein, showrunner - IndieWire, "The Secret Behind a One-Take Michel Gondry Scene" (September 2018)
Jake Schreier, director - IndieWire (September 2018)
Maxwell Orgell, production designer - Pond5 Blog, "Keep Rolling: How to Pull Off a Complicated Long Take" (January 2019)
Shawn Kim, Director of Photography - Pond5 Blog (January 2019)
Showtime – BTS split-screen video, “One-Shot Scene BTS” (October 2018)
TV Obsessive - "Kidding: Every Pain Needs a Name (Episode 3)" (September 2018)
Geeks of Doom - "How Showtime's Kidding Pulled Off Incredible One-Shot" (October 2018)
Laughing Squid - "The Quick Moving, Highly Efficient Process Behind the One Shot" (October 2018)
The Cinemaholic - "Jim Carrey's Kidding: Where Was the TV Show Filmed?" (2024)
Wikipedia - Kidding (TV series)ne, can find its way to the light.
Read also
Panic Room (2002) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/panic-room - Previous entry in the collection, another set transformed into a staging machine
Adolescence (2025) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/adolescence - Next in the collection, another series that pushes the continuous learning plan into uncharted territory
