hmm oh light change what do you think nice colors right welcome to the era of mobile phone
filmmaking smartphones are really catching up on professional cinema grade cameras now don't get
me wrong don't jump off a roof just yet if you've just spent 10 grand on a brand new Blackmagic 12k
they're not quite there yet however i do believe we are entering an era where
there is now going to be three sets of filmmakers there's gonna be your big
hollywood studio filmmakers who are using the ARRI 65 in a 3D dual rig on car stabilized gimbals
because they can afford it there's gonna be your indie filmmakers who
are gonna be shooting with the Red Komodos they're going to be shooting with the Blackmagic pockets
and then there's going to be the mobile phone filmmakers
most of the big manufacturers like Canon Sony and Red are now looking at the indie filmmakers
as their core markets no longer are these manufacturers focusing on the big studios
where they can sell a handful of very high priced cameras instead they're focusing on bringing
those incredible features down into cameras and systems that are a fraction of the cost
but can sell thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of units instead
features effects and tools are being taken from these incredibly expensive
camera systems and being ported into mobile phones
and with a single touch a single swipe we're able to get colors effects slow motion hyper-lapse time-lapse
in ways that are so easy so intuitive that used to take years to master whereas now mobile
phones are doing them automatically now some people are
going to argue that this gets rid of the art of filmmaking and i do think there is a very
valid argument there the way in which you create a time lapse the way in which you use color has to
be understood and mastered to truly utilize it perfectly but until people actually have those
tools in their hands how are they possibly ever going to understand how to use these tools in the
last year alone we have seen every single major mobile phone manufacturer release a mobile phone
capable of recording 4k resolution footage and some of them are releasing 8k resolution footage
to put that into perspective i remember waiting about seven years to get a camera that could shoot
4k from my initial HD cameras and this is going back to when cameras were six seven eight
thousand pounds when i bought the Sony fs700 it's huge it's a big beast of a camera and it's got a
lot of great features to it but it could only film 1920 by 1080 internally and it could do it in a
very very low bit rate and what that means is the videos would be very very compressed
it took another two or three years after that for recorders to come
out to enable the Sony fs700 to be able to record full 4k resolution from the camera and that really
was some beautiful beautiful footage coming from that camera but mobile phones are able to already
do much higher resolution and at far higher bit rates than even the Sony fs700
and even then it's only in 2020 that we finally got 8k cameras in the indie
film industry previously to that Red were the only real camera systems that were pushing for
higher resolution in the higher end of the cinema market with the Red Helium Monstro cameras both
retailing for roughly 30 to 40,000 pounds just for the body no no lenses batteries monitors or
anything basically just a box with a CPU and a sensor is that it and you were dropping the
deposit on a house a nice house and you're getting a camera whereas now you're getting 8k resolution
in a mobile phone it's crazy it's amazing but we all know the
resolution is not the be-all and end-all this does not make a great image just because i have 8,000
pixels to play with doesn't mean that my image suddenly is cinematic there
is a lot more that goes on behind the scenes than that in the way in which the image is processed by
the device that you're using the colors the skin tones also the control of that camera
do you have complete control over every aspect of the filmmaking process
now what might surprise you is there actually have been a cadre of filmmakers really
really prevalent filmmakers in the industry who have already been pioneering into mobile
phone filmmaking from Steven Soderbergh who's created multiple feature films on a mobile phone
and that's your agent i want to get you there and
even Zach Schneider with his short film Snow Steam and Iron
even the commercial for the iPhone 11 directed by Sam Hargrave
which was a fantastic romp of a snowball fight shot so cinematically proves to us
that you can get great images out of these cameras but what it also proves to us
is that you still need to know what you're doing to what is in front
of the camera how are you lighting how are you blocking and how are you treating
with all of these creative tools that are in these incredible devices that are in our pockets
you basically have a camera with a touchscreen monitor in the back that is better than most
touchscreen monitors that you can buy for a thousand dollars because of just how many people
have mobile phones there is a slew of incredible apps and software that you
can download for next to no money compared to the cinema based equivalents and these open up
the capabilities of the phone give you the control that you need to get the best
quality of image out of the phone itself other fantastic tools
that are just so accessible such as the DJI Osmo 4 Gimbal for mobile phones is just a hundred
pounds this is so much cheaper than their cinema equivalent because well it's only really having
to stabilize a very light device but it gives you fantastic creative control and is so worth
investing in you can get cinema cages which enable you to get a wider more stable grip on your phone
because i mean when you're holding your phone like this there's a whole lot of wobble to it
but imagine you've got a handle out here you can have cages which give you the ability to get much
stabler shots you can also get pretty good sound from plug-in shotgun mics but i would thoroughly
recommend the Rode Wireless GO lavalier system because as soon as you get a little distance from
your subject you're going for a wide shot if you still need to hear what they're saying or doing
having a wireless signal being sent to your phone from a lavalier mic it really just cuts down on
a lot of the extra stress and strain of trying to get clean audio with a microphone that's just too
far away from the subject there is no more barrier to access with filmmaking you can go out there
you can create you can iterate hone and perfect your skills as a filmmaker with your mobile phone
i released three episodes a week so don't forget to check back next week
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