How: iphone is not IMAX Part Three

iphone aesthetic v IMAX aesthetic
#iphonenichtimax

Although an iphone camera gives you great speed there is also a major disadvantage -- lack of lens choice.

No matter what sort of doo-dad you mount, tape, whatever to your cellphone, you will only get what the fixed size lens and sensor chip in combination with Apple software allow you to get.  These are technological issues, but cropping in on a sensor chip and calling it a "zoom" will not get you the same image as using a long focal length lens.

At some point I'm sure you'll be able to "dial in" the lens look you want -- say a long Panavision lens -- and the software will emulate that lens and transform the image much the same way you can plug your $50 Strat knock-off into your phone and dial in a Marshal stack at full volume and sound awesome -- or loud anyway.  But doing that with images is much more complicated and will require a little 3-D info from a second lens -- something some smartphones can already shoot.  All you need is the software . . . but remember playing a digital sampler to give you a Marshal at 11 is not anything like playing a '59 Strat through a Marshal at 11, so don't get too excited.

What I'm saying is, until the tech changes radically, you have an iphone that is optimized for a particular focal length lens, whereas IMAX has interchangable lenses -- and this is important.

You are telling a story in images, that is, transforming the world into an edited 2-D resemblance of reality.  Like in music, where a minor chord makes you feel sad and a major makes you feel happy, different focal lengths make your audience feel different -- and you need this full range -- making a feature with a single focal length is risky.  I tried some in-front-of-lens add-ons and didn't like what I got.  There are only a few shots where I used a telephoto attachment and mostly it because there was little movement:

For techies out there this was shot with the actor sitting in a folding chair just outside his open front door.  The sun is diffused by a high thin layer of clouds and there was a short awning over the door casting a faint shadow.  I had him sit just inside the shadow of the awning.  I draped a black cloth behind him and used the telephoto add-on with the iphone on a tripod.  As I rolled camera I told him to think of different moments in his life like when he lost someone he loved, or some moment when he wanted revenge.  Great face to photograph.

I found the telephoto attachment gave me the compression of space I wanted, but basically cut the scan rate in half.  Since he was to be mostly static in this image, it worked.  This is a different image than if I had "zoomed" in with the camera.  Those zooms are only cropping the scan of the chip.

I needed a real telephoto lens to get certain kinds of shots, especially in low light:

So I brought in a second shooter.  He shot on three afternoons and one evening.  About 100 of the shots in the project were done by him.  He used a Canon 5D.  In a chase movie like this one, the ability to change the audience's psychological distance is one of the most powerful tools you have as as filmmaker.

Most of the project was shot with my iphone 4S at its widest giving me what I used for my "normal" lens.  It is very close to a 35mm on a 35mm film camera.  I shot for many years with a Leica M3 double-stroke using a 35mm Summicron lens and really like that focal length.
It gave me a bit of compression:

but also created visual space like a wide:

But I still needed a wide angle.  I had tight interior spaces on numerous vehicles and locations.  My iphone was too long in focal length to be useful for really tight spaces.

Almost 20% of my budget went to the purchase of a GoPro Hero 3+ and all sorts of mounts.  I used it for car interiors:

And for landscapes:

And since I could do underwater shots, I used a GoPro submerged in water dyed red to create one of Anne's nightmare images:

I also kept using the same focal lengths over and over.  I never zoomed the iphone.  My second camera guy was doing my long shots for me (here's a case where having your out line done will inform you as to when you need to bring in someone or something special).  And the GoPro had three wide angle settings.  So when I got in the editing room, I had shots from five focal lengths.  This makes the shifts from one shot to the next easier on the eye.  I don't care for zoom lenses -- unless the DP is willing to limit themselves to only using four or five specific focal lengths.  Attention to these choices while shooting will make your life in the editing room much easier.

How: iphone is not IMAX Part Two

iphone aesthetic v IMAX aesthetic
#iphonenichtimax


The main advantage an iphone has over IMAX every time -- speed.  At this level of film making, speed is everything.  With $4k you aren't going to shoot for very many days.  Including a great deal of camera testing we did in the first month, some of which we used, we shot for a total of one year.

Most of the shooting we did in April and May, then some pick up shots in Aug, and finally the stragglers for various reasons.  59 days.  And a whole year.  Sounds like a lot.  But not when you do the math.

Let's round to 60 days to make it easier.  These are almost all (2 exceptions) half day shoots.  This is because there was no budget to feed people and the light is best here from 2pm until sunset.  The GoPro and iphone both were unreliable for shooting in low light so we were generally done before sunset because the sun dropped behind the mountains -- usually about 4 hours of shooting.  So that's 240 hours of shooting.  Divide that by a 60 hour six day production week and that's a four week shoot.  Which is about the standard length for modestly budgeted indie projects.

Our year shoot gave us lots of time to edit and shoot and re-edit and re-shoot, which sounds awesome until you try to maintain continuity.  The seasons change, even in SoCal and northern Mexico.  Weather shifts.  Construction develops.  Actors move away.  The light changes a little bit every day, even if, and perhaps especially if, it is a bright sunny day.  Again, not saying you should take a year, but plan on it (I planned on six months of shooting . . .).  All sorts of reality impinges on you when, just as one example, everyone is working for free.  If paying work materializes, it must take priority.  Even when everything worked out for us, occasionally, at the last minute, someone would have to bail out and we'd have to push the shoot.

But back to speed.  I had a chase movie that needed to visually move at a quick pace which means lots of shots.  Around 1600 shots were used (averaging one every 3 seconds).  To get to that I shot 4,000 GoPro shots, 2,100 iphone shots, and had a second camera shoot another 400 shots.  In the final edit I used about 400 GoPro shots, 1,100 iphone shots, and 100 of the second camera.

Basically I pulled the trigger on a shot about 6,000 times in all that shooting.  In 60 half days, that's 100 shots a day, that is, about 25 shots an hour.  I was "tripping the shutter" an average of once every 2.4 minutes.  Now that's not entirely true because occasionally I had two cameras rolling, but the point is, I moved fast to get the number of shoots I was looking for.

Why? Because I needed those shots.  If you are using inexperienced or non-actors, you need coverage of every scene to be able to edit a good performance out of them.  If you are doing any action sequences, you will need massive numbers of shots to keep the energy moving.  So drama or action, you need coverage.  Not having coverage was the killer of some of my earlier dramatic short films shot on 16mm.  A 16mm Arri is slow to move around, set up, light for, etc.  I could throw a tripod on the ground with a GoPro or iphone on it, level it with my iphone level app, compose a shot and call action in less than a minute.  A whole minute if I had the opportunity to practice the camera move, first.

So it may sound awesome to "have had the luxury" of an entire year to shoot a film, but down at the fine-grain level, day-to-day, we were moving very fast.  This project would never get completed if it was shot on IMAX.  It would take a decade.

Use the format's strengths to the max.

Which is not to say I found everything it did or didn't do acceptable.

What: Structure and Sequencing Part Two

So how do you create a sequence?

This is what I did:
Break it down on a spreadsheet with one line representing each minute.  Number each line until you get to ninety.  Now go in and bold the lines that are the beginning of your sequences.

In this early story version I was working with six 15 minute sequences. 

Those 15 min seqs got split in half and I began working with 8 min seqs with the intent of growing a few of them to as much as 12 mins.

Regardless of how long the sequences are for the moment, what is important is that you fill in what your main character is doing at the end of each sequence -- not thinking, saying, considering, or wishing for -- what is the character doing?  It should be a point the character is moving toward in the next sequence, brought into focus by what the character wants (not what they need).  The ending of each sequence should move the audience forward with a shift in the dramatic question.

If you don't fully understand dramatic question, the easy answer is: So what's going to happen because of that choice?  For details, check your McKee for the "story gap", as he calls it.  It is largely modulated by the differential between what the character knows and what the audience knows.  In essence, it is the old mantra of always keeping the audience asking the question: But what happens next?

In Holiday, here's what Graham wants, the dramatic question, and what he does at the end, for each sequence:
Seq 1) Wants someone to abduct -- Who will he abduct?/Makes contact with Anne
Seq 2) Wants to abduct Anne -- How will he abduct her?/Abducts Anne
Seq 3) Wants to escape the Russian -- Will he escape the Russians?/Takes Anne to Mexico
Seq 4) Wants to sell Anne -- Will he sell her?/Leaves Anne to set up sale
Seq 5) Wants a car -- Will he return before she escapes?/Returns in car
Seq 6) Wants deal over and done -- Will he catch Anne?/Loses Anne
Seq 7) Wants to find Anne -- Will he sell Anne?/Drives Anne to sale
Seq 8) Wants his money -- Will he survive?/Slithers away into the brush

Some of these are weaker than others so don't use this as anything more than a good attempt -- I want to document what I did, not what I wish I did, so this is what I used.  If you cannot begin with defining six to eight points your character is moving toward, your story will wander and lose your audience.  Begin by considering what might be the important moments to the character in the story you want to tell.  I ended up using only three of my original six sequence endings, adding five new ones as the project developed and it became clear what was going to being interesting as we explored and shot each sequence.

So once you have those anchor points, you know where every scene needs to lead.  Begin to fill in various moments that might lead up to your first anchor point.  Remember one line is one minute and most scenes last at least one minute, but rarely more than 5.  An easy way to start is break the sequences into thirds just like a three act script -- 1/3 for a beginning, 1/3 for the tension to build, and 1/3 for your resolution and wind up to the next scene.

How: iphone is not IMAX Part One

iphone aesthetic v IMAX aesthetic
#iphonenichtimax

IMAX is awesome.  Great format, great camera and lenes, great sound.  Rich.  Powerful.
And very expensive.

We often use the best as the measuring standard and moviemaking is no different.  And even though my iphone now shoots 4k images that look great, an iphone camera is not an IMAX camera.  Since you have $4k, you will not be shooting on IMAX.  Does that mean your project will look "bad" and thus be unmarketable?  Not necessarily.  It won't be mistaken for an IMAX movie, but that doesn't mean you won't have something marketable.  The first step in this process is to accept what is so about the format you chose and know when and how to get the results you want within the limitations of the format, IMAX or iphone.

Back a long time ago I shot landscape photography with a Rollei medium-format film camera, but I also shot Polaroids.  Each had their virtues and their limitations, but no one said work done with an SX-70 (by the likes of Warhol and Ansel Adams, to name a few) was "not as good" simply because it didn't meet up to a different format's standards of excellence.  It was just a different aesthetic.  iphone is not IMAX.  That's better in some ways, worse in others.  Embrace it for its advantages and in the areas where it falls short of IMAX, do what you must, then allow it to be whatever it is.

Using an iphone creates an aesthetic with its own calculus.  For the moment, it is most certainly an "outsider aesthetic", due to certain technical specifications compared to studio output, but it will quickly become the norm.  With the transition from scheduled network tv to internet-based delivery there is a growing appetite for content -- but at a much lower rate.  It will be interesting to see what is "outside" at the point of complete digital conversion and content shot on cell phones becomes the majority of the product consumed.  For now, if you make a film for $4k, you are part of an "outsider aesthetic".

Which is not to say that working in an "outsider aesthetic" means the work is, by default, interesting.  Not all punk bands were interesting.  You still need to create something worth a response.  This is about discernment, not a judgement.  Good vs. bad is a lame, lazy way to breakdown the world.  Don't think that you'll magically end up with a hip indie movie just because you shot it on an iphone.  And besides that, very cool work is done every year in IMAX, almost always using an "insider aesthetic" (the business calls them genres).

So don't think that because you edited together 85 minutes of iphone footage you have something watchable, or a project you can sell, because it's "outside".  If no one wants to sit through it, maybe it's not because it's too hip for your audience; maybe it's just boring.  For me, an outsider aesthetic comments on insider norms by turning those norms in on themselves, calling their authority into question.  For certain, your $4k project is going to have an "outside aesthetic", no matter what you do.  How you play in that aesthetic is what will distinguish you.

For the most part, my iphone 4S and GoPro cameras did what they did and I went with it.  The image I got was the image I worked with.

Sometimes it was really good and sometimes with the iphone the contrast range was too much and either shadows went dark or highlights popped over 255.  Sometimes the focus drifted -- not an issue with the GoPros since they are fixed focus.  The GoPros, however, when I was first started using them, I didn't know what I was shooting because I didn't have a display for the cameras (I later bought one for the Hero 3+).  I could see through the lens with an app on my iphone (as long as I wasn't also shooting with my phone), but when the camera rolled the image blanked out.  Some worked, some didn't.   

Most of the time I didn't use less than technically well-executed images, but sometimes I did.  The only question was: "Does the image effectively convey the emotion of the moment?"  I had one person tell me those shots were "bad" shots.  Sure compared to IMAX.

I did pay attention when it came to the lighting, especially with the iphone.  The GoPro was awesome -- I sometimes pointed right into the sun and still got a good image.  At this level of filmmaking you need to just go with what it gives you.  The auto-focus, auto-exposure, auto color balance all solve many issues, but create new ones, as well.

I loved having an instant synced production soundtrack and it was great to shoot around crowded areas without attracting attention -- I just looked like another tourist with a cell phone.

But the main advantage an iphone has over IMAX every time -- speed.