#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.
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