You Can Shoot a Movie on a Phone. Just Don’t Expect It to Be Easy

The industry has a stigma. From the audience's point of view, a good film is a good film. There is a stigma in the industry. She saw using a phone as a challenge instead of an obstacle and ended up working with Nick.

High-end equipment in the film industry is believed to be the reason why phone cameras aren't taken seriously enough. Even if your work isn't always professional, using a cinema camera can make it feel that way. Students come to film schools to learn about high-end cameras and lens, so having to use a phone doesn't seem appealing.

It's hard to think critically about the details of a shoot if you use a phone. When you're dealing with something that can't be captured immediately, the contemplation of the image becomes more important. There are more chances to stop and think. It's correct. Every day we use phones to read the news, play games, and capture content. You can use a cinema camera to focus on your creativity. It's possible that a phone doesn't make you the same person.

It is in control.

Every year, phone makers highlight the improvements to their image-processing technology, which affects what a video clip will look like. Automatic brightening up, boosting color saturation, or smoothing out the details are some of the things that can be done. The filmic pro app was used by the team to access the raw hardware in the phone. We would have a couple of phones. We would use the internet to control the main phone and pull focus on one phone. It worked just like a normal crew, except the gear doesn't fit in your hand.

The control over the look of the film was given by cutting out all of the processing. There were things the camera could not control. Smartphone cameras are designed to capture good pictures no matter how poor our photography skills are, so they often help improve the shot by automatically tweaking the camera settings in a way that makes a bad photo look better. In a scene where he wanted to keep an actor's face in shadow, but the phone would compensate to make them look nicer, he explained. When the team was trying to make sure every frame was consistent, the phone tried to auto-correct scenes.

The team was able to trick the camera to stop doing this by lighting scenes in a certain way or pointing the sensor at a bright or dark surface. The process of fixing these issues in postproduction is similar to what's done on other short films using cinema cameras.