The iPhone is the movie camera for
the rest of us. See how we and other award- winners are using it and what you
can add for pro results
It’s through his ownership of Pixar that
Steven Jobs is best known for changing the face of the film industry. But with
the iPhone, another Apple legacy is emerging as movie-makers choose its clear
and convenient HD camera as an alternative to conventional equipment.
iPhone filming is a cult pursuit that’s
going main-stream. In February, the iPhone Film Festival (iphoneff.com)
announced the winners of its fourth awards in genres including documentary,
music video, animation and feature film. Major studios have incorporated
iPhone-shot scenes, and accessory makers are introducing adaptors to bring
serious glass and pro rigging to iPhone cinematography. The potential is
historic: never before has so much moving picture technology been so easily
accessible to the individual.
Creative
Edge iPhone Movie Makers: Small Screen, Big Picture
You don’t even need the latest model,
although the cameras have continued to improve since the quite usable 3GS. My
iPhone 4S was the natural took of choice for researching my new documentary. It
recorded crystal-clear interviews and filmed locations beautifully, while apps
such as Notes and Reminders made data collection and overall organization easy
– all on the same highly portable piece of equipment.
When I reviewed the crisp 1080p footage, my
heart was set on making my film about old age – working title ‘To the End of
Love’ – as an iPhone movie. The addictive immediacy of the medium and the
instant access to every step of the process, from scripting and shooting to
color grading and editing, made cameras seem archaic.
A deeper delves into the iPhone film-making
scene revealed a professional and rapidly expanding range of hardware and an
overwhelming number of movie apps. Some of this offer a more conducive shooing
environment than the built-in Camera software, while others help you cut and
grade. While not all iOS filmmakers choose to edit on the device too – your
footage is easily imported into iMovie on the Mac, or the reasonably affordable
and fully professional Final Cut Pro X – it can certainly be done. And above
all, in iPhone filming I found the enthusiasm, mold-breaking thinking and fresh
creative spirit of a true renaissance movement.
Steady
as you go: Manfrotto’s Modosteady is one if number of compact stabilizers you
can attach to your iPhone. Use it like this with dangling balance weight or
brace the articulated arm horizontally against your body to help hold the
camera firmly
Like fellow users, I already had countless
hours of iPhone filming under my belt, but this is my first proper iPhone
short, and I hope my experience so far will be of use to anyone considering
their own project using the device. I’ll mention some of the equipment and apps
I’ve accumulated as well as the techniques I’ve experimented with to get the most
satisfying results.
The iPhone adores full daylight, and if you
happen to have Californian sunshine available it delivers simply gorgeous video
quality. Noise becomes an issue in low light, and that’s when you’ll need to
pick your shots carefully to avoid asking the impossible feat of pulling clean
detail out of the dark. Whatever the lighting, one thing the iPhone’s class of
video sensor won’t tolerate is swift camera movements, which inevitably produce
unsightly blur.
The rear-facing insight camera is the one
you’ll be using. My iPhone 4S has pretty much the same specs as the iPhone 5,
delivering 1080p HD at 30fps. Of course, 1080p is a resolution spec, not a
quality level; it’s good to know you have all the pixels you need, but the
image from different cameras of this same nominal rating will vary enormously.
The iPhone is obviously limited in its hardware capabilities, with a tiny lens
and sensor, but the components are surprisingly good Apple’s operating system
software makes the most of them with intelligent automatic adjustments.
Tao and hold to lock focus and exposure on
that point in the frame – great for setting up your shots
When shooting in video mode with the
iPhone’s standard Camera app, you can tap anywhere on the screen to focus on
that part of the frame. The exposure will also be based on this point. If you
tap and hold until ‘AE/AF Lock’ shows on the screen, exposure and focus are
both locked, and won’t adjust automatically until you unlock them by tapping
again.
This is great for setting up shots, since
you won’t want the camera to adjust itself after you’ve got things the way you
want. Once you’re locked off, if the light changes slightly or something moves
in the frame, the camera won’t hunt for a new focus or exposure, which could
create a distracting effect in the footage. You can also choose what to focus
on, even if it isn’t the most prominent or central object in the frame, and get
some manual control over exposure by locking on a brighter or darker area.
Slide
of life: Hanmah’s film, inspired by her experiences caring for elderly people,
takes an honest look at the reality of later life. Using an iPhone meant she
could shoot freely in award spaces and still produces footage of a compelling
quality
Sometimes you might need to set focus and
exposure separately, and unfortunately the Camera app doesn’t let you do that.
However, it is allowed by the hardware and Apple makes this facility accessible
to developers, so this is one reason you might want to shoot with a third-party
video app.
Otherwise, you can often cheat the result
you want by finding something to lock on that happens to be at the right
distance for focus as well as a suitable brightness level for exposure.
Remember this can be outside the frame you plan to shoot, because you can move
the camera once the AE/AF lock is set – just be sure to double-check the focus
before and after you shoot.
At the top left corner of the Camera app
screen you’ll find the On, Off and Auto light options. The small LED light
beside the iPhone’s camera is no substitute for the even the most portable of
photographic lights, but it does produce a surprisingly strong little beam that
can rescue an otherwise overly dark shot when the subject is fairly close. The
catch I found, on the rare occasions when I tried using this, was that both
elderly subjects filmed for this documentary and the autistic people I filmed
previously found the intense light disturbing, so I worked around it.
