Film with a Phone?

It’s almost 10 years since Austin Reza shot a film for Bentley’s luxury cars: on an iPhone 5S. At the time, it was still in stylish black and white and with high contrasts – no doubt also to prevent artefacts from becoming too obvious. Back in 2011, Park Chan-wook and Park Chan-kyong from South Korea even shot the fantasy horror “Night Fishing” on an iPhone 4 in colour and won a Golden Bear for the best short film. Apple itself, on the other hand, has generally shot its advertising films on cameras such as the Arri Alexa.

But now the "Scary Fast" event for the release of Apple's M3 computers was filmed entirely on the iPhone, as the credits alone reveal. On YouTube you can find the "Behind theScenes...", where it also becomes clear that the filming and technical effort was actually the same as always(is.gd/iphone_bts). But the dollies, cranes and the drone were actually just sitting on a new iPhone 15 Pro Max. In addition, the predominant visual theme was "black", matching one of the new laptop colours.

The EU is to blame This doesn't mean that this iPhone is a low-light wonder (it isn't), but that you can set the light to high contrast and then grade it to black. The decisive factor is that recording in ProRes with Log is now available. Apple would certainly have liked to hold on to an in-house connection for longer. But the EU has demanded that all smartphones that come onto the market here in 2024 must have USB-C. Apple has taken the plunge and has already installed t...


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