“That’s how innovation happens,” says Sonja Schenk, a multimedia artist and author of the The Digital Filmmaking Handbook. It seems to be the only film whose unusual production technique was motivated first and foremost by a kind of playful, creative showmanship: that gadget you have in your pocket – just see what I can do with it. Later, both This Is Not A Film, made by Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi while he was under house arrest, and the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man were completed using cellphone footage for pragmatic reasons. A movie called Olive, which was made with a Nokia N8 for $500,000, billed itself as “the very first full-length feature film shot 100 per cent on a cellphone” when it hit festivals in 2011. Oldboy director Park Chan-wook made an award-winning short called Night Fishing on an iPhone 4 in 2011, which was paid for by South Korea’s only iPhone distributor at the time. Ruben Kazantsev, who has been running the iPhone Film Festival since 2010, tells LWLies that a short film called Happenstance was made on a hacked iPhone 3G in 2009. Which isn’t to say this kind of thing hasn’t been tried before. You do it for the same reasons artists have been doing crazy shit forever: to see if you can, and to find out what might happen in the attempt. You don’t make an iPhone movie to save money, and you don’t make it just so your stars adjust a little quicker to being on set. As a cinematographer, he said, he had to be sold on the idea: “This is the last thing we would want to do,” he told IndieWire, “to shoot a movie with telephones.” The professional sound department and audio equipment consumed a big chunk of the $100,000-ish budget and DoP Radium Cheung had previously directed episodes of FX TV series The Americans. Filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass, referred to by Wired earlier this year as an “unlikely Hollywood juggernaut”, are credited as executive producers. There’s certainly an intoxicating energy that’s captured in the film (thanks also to a trap soundtrack featuring the relatively unknown New Jersey teenager DJ Lightup) but all of the above would still be possible if Baker had kept his crew minimal and shot quickly on a small, cheap video camera – like a Blackmagic Micro, which fits in one hand, is only a hundred bucks more expensive than a brand new iPhone, and isn’t primarily designed for texting, snapchatting and hailing an Uber.Īfter all, this was a microbudget film, but it wasn’t made for nothing. Baker has also spoken about the way that the cameras allowed his crew to shoot easily in cars, circle and track the actors on a bicycle, or chase them as they careened down Santa Monica Boulevard. The film’s two stars, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, whom Baker met through an LGBT community centre, had no previous acting experience, and it’s true that their performances are fantastic, full of warring charisma and vulnerability. ![]() Shooting on a phone allowed him to capture the grime and neon glow of Hollywood without attracting crowds, and it put his performers at ease. There were budgetary constraints he’s made four previous features but none of them were commercial hits. He kept repeating variations on the same answers. Since then, press interviews with Baker have been dominated by a handful of recurring questions: How did you do it? Why? And what does this mean for the future of movies? So what was Sean Baker thinking when he decided to shoot Tangerine, an 88-minute movie about a trans sex worker on the war path, on an iPhone 5s? The film, which takes place in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, premiered at Sundance back in January, and critics weren’t told that it was shot on a smart phone until the credits rolled. You can put the phone on a stabiliser to stop the inevitable shaking, use an app to lock the frame rate and manually adjust the colour temperature, reformat the image for widescreen with an adapter, pump up the saturation in post, and you’d still get better looking footage with the video function on an entry level DSLR. ![]() You’re always the same distance from your subject. Nothing is quite sharp, but nothing recedes softly into the background either. You can’t refocus or adjust the exposure in the middle of a shot. ![]() Making a fictional feature film using the camera on a mobile phone is a crazy thing to do.
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