“We press record on the camera, and we don’t press stop until the very end of the hour.”

Everyone is talking about Adolescence. The four-episode Netflix limited series, which was co-created and written by its star Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, tells the story of a fictional 13-year-old named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), who is arrested for the murder of a teenage girl who goes to his school.

“We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser,” Graham told Netflix’s Tudum. “Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, ‘My God. This could be happening to us!’ And what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.”

Netflix

In addition to the eerily prescient premise, the process of filming the series has also resonated with viewers, as each episode is comprised of captivating one-shot takes. Director Philip Barantini explained the technique to Tudum.

“Basically that means we press record on the camera, and we don’t press stop until the very end of the hour,” Barantini said. “But it’s much more complicated than it sounds. It takes months of preparation and weeks of rehearsals and an incredible team of people to pull it off at every stage, from the script to the locations to the production design to where exactly the camera is going to be able to shoot and from what angle.”

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Here, we break down all of the Adolescence filming secrets, from how many shots it took to film each episode to how they filmed that drone shot.

How was Adolescence filmed?

Shortly after the series premiere, Netflix shared which takes the production team decided to use for each episode.

Producers used the second take for episode 1, which was set mostly in a police station and captured on the first day of a five-day shoot. Episode 2 used take 13 amid a cast of 370 extras.

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Episode 3 used the 11th take featuring the interaction between Jamie and a psychologist (played by Erin Doherty). The fourth and final episode was captured during take 16 as the Millers wrestled with the reality of their child’s situation.

According to Netflix, the team’s original plan was to “film each episode in full 10 times (once in the morning, once in the afternoon, across five days) – but in reality a few attempts had to be abandoned and restarted, so some episodes had many more than 10 takes.”

Courtesy of Ben Blackall/Netflix © 2024//Netflix

Did they use a drone at the end of Adolescence episode 2?

Yes, in the final moments of episode 2, the team used a drone camera. “The surprising thing was using the technical to free us,” Thorne told Tudum.

But there was a risk, as director of photography Matthew Lewis said the shot could have felt too much like a video game, which would “just take the audience away from what the piece is.” Barantini, however, came up with a solution, which involved attaching the camera to a drone to create what Lewis described as a “more ethereal” feel.

“It was an example of the technical meeting the story and finding a fusion which is actually better than anything the story had come up with on its own,” Thorne added.

Netflix

Where was Adolescence filmed?

Most of Adolescence was filmed in studios in Pontefract in West Yorkshire, which are usually used by musicians as a rehearsal space.

“It was a massive, brilliant space, one of the best I’ve worked in, and we were able to build our police station there and also our interview room for episode 3,” Barantini said. “It became the nerve center of the entire production.”

The studios were also near enough to the real locations used in the series that the camera could travel between them in real time.