![]() ![]() What they really are is big, bright, and soft. ![]() It makes the lighting rigs seem more complex than they really are. The two reasons I can image they did this are to be low-impact on the campus itself (rubber wheels instead of metal stands), and to be able to adjust the lighting quickly out of respect for Cook’s valuable time. Should you look at the giant lights in Apple’s video and feel dejected that your own productions will never afford this level of illumination? I say no, because a) you’re probably not lighting up the whole side of an architectural marvel, and b) you’re probably not designing your production around one of the world’s highest-paid CEOs.įor Tim Cook’s appearance, Apple’s production had their giant LED light panels on camera dollies, which is not typical. So getting the light right is more meaningful to a photo than anything else. Timmy’s birthday and Sally’s wedding are reduced to nothing but photons before they become photographs. Photos are nothing but light - it’s literally all they are made of. Lighting matters more than any camera, more than any lens. Apple Log has catapulted the iPhone into filmmaking legitimacy. It may be hard to imagine that a slightly different bit of signal processing when recording a video file from a tiny sensor can make the difference between consumer birthday-cam and professional viability, but that is exactly the power of log. As I detailed here in words and video, the “iPhone video look” is designed to win consumer popularity contests, not mimic Apple’s own marketing videos, nor plug into professional workflows. There is one single feature of the iPhone 15 Pro that made this stunt possible: Log. They Shot ProRes Log: Matters So Much It Would Be Impossible Without It With “Scary Fast,” Apple repeated their now well-established high-production-value playbook, but yoinked out the professional cameras and lenses, and dropped in a commodity consumer telephone in their place. These videos have looked great ever since Covid pushed Apple to find an alternative to executives-on-stage-in-front-of-slides, and even as Apple is now once again able to welcome guests to in-person product launches, these lavishly-produced videos are the new gold standard in pitching the world on a new iThing. Elaborate visual effects transition between locations and settings that might be partially virtual. They’re not just executives teleprompting in front of Keynote slides - they feature “slice of life” moments shot on huge sets and real locations. Apple was effectively saying “pro enough for you, but not for us.” Valid, but a bit dissatisfying.Īpple has set the aesthetic bar impossibly high with these pre-recorded events. Apple tells you about how great, and even “pro,” these new iPhone cameras are - but would never have dreamt of using them to shoot their own videos or product stills. Let’s take it one at a time: That They Did It: Does MatterĪs camera features have played a larger and larger role in Apple’s marketing for new iPhones over the years, you might have begun to feel a bit of cognitive dissonance. With all that gear and production support, which aspects of the event really matter to you, the iPhone-curious filmmaker? What can you learn, and which aspects can you safely ignore? We greedily soaked up all the details in the behind-the-scenes video, and made a hundred tiny calculations about which aspects of this lavish production actually mattered to the question of the iPhone 15’s validity as a professional camera, and which did not. In the filmmaking community, it was the mic drop of the year. It was an odd feeling to scrounge for the adapter plates required to mount a $3,000 DV camcorder purchased at Circuit City to a Fisher dolly that literally has no purchase price.Īpple, of course, has no burden of best-practices logic for their decision to shoot their “Scary Fast” event on iPhone - it’s a marketing ploy, a cool stunt, and a massive flex. ![]() I’ve been on a lot of productions like this, having played an active role in the DV filmmaking revolution of the late ’90s-to-early-2000s. ![]() “Shot on iPhone” doesn’t promise “and you can do it too” any more than Stanley Kubrick lighting Barry Lyndon with candlelight means anyone with candles can make Barry Lyndon.īut when the camera is the least expensive piece of gear on the set after clothespins and coffee, it does feel strange. At this point, some folks felt differently about what was implied by “Shot on iPhone.” There have been bad takes on this, and good takes on those bad takes.Īnyone who knows the tiniest bit about video production knows that the camera is a small, but important, but small, part of the overall production picture. ![]()
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