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First Ever Short Film Shot on an iPhone 3GS!

B

bonzox

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 12, 2008
12
0
As a freelance videographer/editor, and admitted partial fanboy, I'm consistently blown away with the iPhone 3GS's video capabilities. If you have good light and a steady hand, it'll take amazing video, on a cell phone!

My inspiration was simple: to create a short film, completely on the iPhone 3GS. Shooting, and editing. The only thing non-iPhone was to assemble the finished clips in iMove and export the finished product (Final Cut Pro did not like these clips, played back with tons of errors).

We shot this over the course of a couple of hours, had it edited in another hour, and posted on youtube that evening.

After filming this, my impression of the iPhone 3GS's video capabilities:

- Shoot outdoors or with as much light as you can get. The movement will be much more fluid and the colors more accurate.
- The mic is awesome when used properly. Don't have anyone speaking too softly or too far away from it though.
- If you can stabilize yourself/your iPhone on something, do so. Shake is a killer of shots. All of this was shot handheld, some of it is shot placing an edge of the phone on a table or something, and some handheld. I'm pretty happy with the handheld shots as it's a small,light device to hold steady. Bear in mind, my handheld is pretty good as I shoot for a living.

Of the iPhone3GS's editing capabilities:

- A lot of clips I was able to trim exactly where I wanted to cut them. Some clips I wasn't, the editing will only allow you to be so precise. If the frame you want to cut on falls between the frames in the trimming timeline on the iPhone, you may not be able to cut with 100% accuracy.
- It can be really tough to get fast, tight edits. If you notice the scene with grabbing the keys it was cut too fast, you miss some of the movement. Err on the side of caution, I should have gave it a little more room.
- All in all it was quick and easy to edit these clips. I was impressed with the speed I picked up after the first 5 edits or so.
- I'll be really glad when 3.1 comes out and you can non-destructively edit, as I could go back and fix that cut. But again, we're not talking about a $2000 editing program, it's a phone ;)

Overall, I'm really happy with how the project turned out. If I was to fine-tune this in additional software, I would tweak a few edits slightly for timing, and of course do the sound.

All in all, the iPhone is a cell phone. To be able to do all of this, with this quality, on a cell phone, is magic.

If you have any questions please ask! Please leave comments!!

Thanks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg3AD5DXM5I
 
not a bad first attempt, although it seems to have no point

and should I be sad that this is better quality than what I get out of my sony camcorder?
 
bonzox said:
As a freelance videographer/editor, and admitted partial fanboy, I'm consistently blown away with the iPhone 3GS's video capabilities. If you have good light and a steady hand, it'll take amazing video, on a cell phone!...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg3AD5DXM5I
Click to expand...

Firstly, well done for doing this on the iPhone. Very cool.

But you asked for comments, so here they are:
The fact that you pointed the iPhone and shot these video clips and edited them together does not make this a film. It's a series of actions with no substance. It is not a film. It is an edited video of your friend buying drink and drinking it.

Sorry to be a little harsh, but you did ask for comments. If you don't understand what I mean above then I'm at a loss of how to explain it to you except to recommend going to watch a film. See how it's cut, how it presents ideas, character arcs, emotions. This has none of those things.

Though, that said, congrats on doing it on the iPhone 3GS. I'd really like to see you make another one that actually qualifies as a film though.
 
The content of the film could show promise, if a story and character development could come into this.

That said, the video quality itself is indeed pretty awesome. Better than any cell phone camera I've seen previously, and even some digital cams that do video. I almost feel like a chump now for getting a Canon T1i. Almost.

A music video has also been made using the 3G, albiet with much more heavy editing using additional software:

http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20090707083835
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

That was a very horrible video...
 
thanks for any feedback everyone!

I should have mentioned that the main focal point of this project was to do it using only the iphone, rather than the story itself.

The story is obviously a simple one; a sad, lonely man, and his only daily solace.

It's more one of those occasions where the medium is the message, if you get what I'm saying.

I wanted to do a simple project using the iphone for shooting, editing, and audio, and then do a review on how all those aspects performed.

Again thanks for checking it out!
 
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