A long take is a shot of extended duration that runs significantly longer than the average shot length in conventional edited film, allowing action and drama to unfold in real time without the interruption of cuts. A sequence shot, sometimes called a plan-séquence, is a specific form of long take in which a single unbroken shot covers an entire dramatic sequence or scene - using camera movement, blocking, and staging to present what multiple edited shots would conventionally cover as one continuous visual event.

The long take has a fundamentally different relationship with time and performance than edited coverage. Without cuts to fall back on, the viewer witnesses events as they unfold continuously, creating a sense of temporal authenticity and presence that edited sequences cannot replicate. Performances must be sustained and complete, camera movement must be precisely choreographed, and every element of the scene must be coordinated across the full duration with no opportunity to cut around mistakes. Directors including Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alfonso Cuarón, and Paul Thomas Anderson have used extended long takes as defining stylistic choices, each exploring what the sustained, unbroken shot can achieve that editing cannot.

In AI video generation, long takes are approximated by generating clips of maximum available duration with clear, continuous action described across the clip's full length. While current tools produce clips measured in seconds rather than minutes, designing prompts that describe smooth, continuous action with no implied cuts - sustained camera movement, ongoing subject behavior, uninterrupted environmental progression - produces footage that reads as a genuine long take within its available duration.