Full transcript of “Why was 28 Years Later shot on an iPhone?”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 28 Years Later came out this week and the talk of the industry is about how it was shot on an iPhone. Now, this is not a world first by any means, but it is super interesting because 28 years later is not a low-budget film. If your film is the third in a well-known series and you have a budget of 60 million and you yourself are a director who's a household name, what compels you to shoot on an iPhone? Is this part of a larger movement that's shifting power away from studios and toward indie filmmakers? Or is shooting on an iPhone just a gimmick? I'm diving into this today. So, I actually teach a course called film making with your smartphone for the National Film and Television School here
0:46 in Scotland. Just a wee plug. But I mention it because there is genuine interest in learning how to make films with a smartphone. and smartphones themselves have been progressing towards creating a cinematic image. There are so many reasons that people want to learn this craft and it might be that they just want to be able to capture better social content, but for some it is about being able to make a highquality project that could play in cinemas. But director Danny Bole is in a place where he could choose to use a higherend cinema camera. So, what has inspired him to use the iPhone? It's very common knowledge that the film that started this whole franchise, 28 Days Later, used very low tech camera
1:34 equipment to shoot. The quality is low by today's standards. But even at the time, it was much lower quality than other films you would see in the cinema. On 28 Days Later, they used the Canon XL1, which records onto DV tape. This is actually what I learned to shoot on when I was at college and it's very cheap compared to other methods of feature film making. Although I remember spending a lot of money on DV tapes when I was at college. I used to have a suitcase full of them, but unfortunately I got rid of them at some point in the last 15 years because they have become a bit of an obsolete format. The Canon XL1 and DV tape combo give a home video feel to the film. It's sort of bloody and the colors bleed into each other. But there were advantages to using this equipment.
2:21 Director Danny Bole has talked in interviews about how they couldn't afford to shut down big areas of central London at a time. So what they did instead was they would shut it down for about 3 minutes. And because they had 20 of these very affordable cameras dotted around the area, they could capture a lot of footage in those 3 minutes. With a traditional cinema camera, you would spend longer than three minutes preparing to hit record. He also said that using DV tape gave the entire film a bit of a home footage feel and as if this was found footage in the style of the Blair Witch Project. Watching 28 Days Later Now is so nostalgic because it looks exactly what British TV looked
3:06 like back in the early naughties. In fact, it's actually quite funny that Christopher Eckleston plays the major in 28 Days Later because this looks exactly like Doctor Who when it was first revived. And interestingly, these old formats, so DV tape, Betamax, videotapes, and even early digital camera models are having a revival of their own at the moment. People are very nostalgic for the look and feel. And so you'll find people going to flea markets and charity shops looking for that old technology. And I I know I'm not that young and hipster, but my partner and I did find an old Sony camera recently, and I am obsessed with the way that it
3:51 films and looks. And I am determined to make a film on this at some point. It's not the easiest way to do so, but I just really love the charm of it. But the reason that such a low-budget film that looked very low-budget and cheap was a success is down to the writing, the performances, and the resourcefulness of the director and the crew. There are some really interesting concepts in 28 Days Later that hadn't been explored yet in other zombie movies at the time. It had something to say about Britain and how stuck in the past it is. And although I was 11 years old in 2002 and have no idea what it was like when this film came out in the cinema because I would be too young to watch it, there is something interesting about how exciting it was to see a low-budget film wear its
4:39 cheapness on its sleeve and just lean into the fact that it has been made on a low budget and make that part of the experience. I think that would have been really liberating for indie filmmakers at the time. I'm not going to touch on 28 Weeks Later, which was the sequel to 28 Days Later because it ultimately wasn't directed by Danny Bole and it wasn't written by the 28 Days Later writer, Alex Garland. It's hard to mention all of these films in the same sentence. You really have to think about what you're saying. But there's also no lofi tech noted in the construction of 28 weeks later. There's no mention of them using particularly lowfi cameras. And so for
5:25 me, there's not really any point in bringing it into this discussion. It's a bit of a middle child film with 28 years later. Danny Bole has elected to use an iPhone as the main camera. It's not the first time an iPhone has been used to create a feature film. Shan Baker used an iPhone 5 to shoot Tangerine and Steven Solderberg used an iPhone to shoot Unsane. But both of those were made on a much lower budget than 28 years later. So Danny Bole has actively made a choice to use a lower budget camera in order to deliver this highbudget film. You can tell from interviews that he really admires the capabilities of small handheld cameras and likes the look they produce. He even talked recently in interviews about how he prefers working with a smaller crew and finds bigger films with bigger crews
6:12 to not really be his favorite style of film making. Now taking a look at the rig that they used for this iPhone that is not simply an iPhone in there. There are all sorts of bells and whistles attached there in order to get the most functionality out of the phone. It may not be a true representation of what you can achieve with your phone at home when you see all of these things added on, but ultimately it is an iPhone body that's capturing the image. Although iPhones are producing great quality images, they haven't until recently been considered a pro-choice because there are still a lot of limitations that you have when you use an iPhone. Smartphone cameras are very good, but when it comes to shooting a film, there are a lot of elements that you need to control to get
6:58 the best out of the image. If you want to shift focus from the foreground to the background, or if you want to overexpose a certain part of the image or underexpose, if you want to have two parts of the screen in focus that are at different depths of field, you can do this with a cinema camera and attachments. But with an iPhone, it's not as straightforward. There are limitations because ultimately this is a phone and not a camera. Apple can't start adding bigger lenses and different things that you can do in the hardware of the phone because it has to fit in your pocket. So even the cinematic mode on an iPhone is just a filter that goes on the background to make it look blurry. However, there have been changes to the iPhone in recent years that have bumped it up from a runaround indie
7:45 filmmaker choice to competing with professional cameras. Cine, a company that reviews high-end cameras and set the metric for what qualifies as the top of the range, recently reviewed the iPhone. The iPhone was never included in this scale because up until last year, the iPhone didn't have a raw file format. A raw file has a huge amount of information packed into it. When you're recording, you are capturing so much detail and so much clarity. Later on, you can then tweak those details to your liking. Most feature films and a lot of professional short films are shot in a raw file format. So, I'm going to show you the original footage for the boulder here, and you can see that it looks
8:31 quite gray. That's because the raw file has a lot of information packed into it and the resulting image to us looks really flat. But once you put that image through a processor and you color grade it, you then are able to lift the colors that you want to and completely sculpt and shape the look of the image. You can see from behind the scenes that we filled the space with vibrant colors and it was lit very strongly. But the raw file format takes that information and packs it in a way that later on we can really strengthen certain colors or we can dull them down depending on what we want to do with each scene. And so Apple introducing a RAW file format to their phones means that you can now have more
9:18 control with your image after you've shot it. Further to this, Blackmagic, who as we know make cameras, also make software, and they released an app for smartphones called Blackmagic Cam. This app allows you to control every aspect of the camera that's built into your phone. You're able to set the ISO, the white balance, and even focus pool. Now, Cine review prolevel cameras and bringing the iPhone into this review means that it has stepped up its game significantly, but it is still the lowest ranking pro camera that they've reviewed. There is some really handy sidebyside footage created here that show you the power of the iPhone image versus the power of an Alexa image. And
10:04 you can clearly see the iPhone doesn't quite process detail at the same level. But what is interesting about all this to me is that if the iPhone has become so professional that it can be included in the class of pro cameras, then is using it to shoot your feature film really a return to your grassroots or are you just using an iPhone because it's a gimmick? This is just a quick ad read because I myself am a filmmaker. I have worked with the BBC, with Screen Scotland, with BAFTA, and I'm a BAFTA member. And I've taken all of the experience that I have from those projects and infused it into my tool, the filmmakaker's game plan, and of course, the filmmakaker's game
10:50 plan ultimate. The tool itself helps you manage your entire production through all of the stages. And the course really digs into how you can access the resources and people and funds that you need to make your film happen. So, this is just a quick plug because if you're watching this thinking you would love to be working in a Hollywood studio someday, the best place to start is making your own indie film project and the filmmaker's game plan can help you do that. Watching 28 Years Later, I knew that they had used an iPhone to film it, but there was no part during the movie where I thought this looks and feels like iPhone footage. The story is gripping and the performances are outstanding, so there's not really a reason to stop and
11:36 think about it in a good or a bad way. They also used an infrared camera to capture some abstract sequences throughout the film. But you're not really stopping to compare the iPhone footage and the infrared footage at all because they don't feel the same. But I wanted to take a look at this picture of a bullet time rig because it was everywhere on social media in the leadup to this film's release. If you don't know, bullet time is the term that was coined around the release of the Matrix, where you set up several cameras in a semicircle, and it means that it creates a 3D effect that allows you to do this very specific slow motion camera movement. And on 28 years later, they set up this idea with iPhones. And you can see them on this big curve around
12:22 one of the characters. So, I went in expecting that we were going to get bullet time. We're going to have a slow mo where the camera moves around one of the zombies, but actually they more used it to jump through time, which honestly is very Danny Bole style. I wasn't really convinced that it needed the iPhone to achieve that effect, but then I did wonder how much money and time have they saved by using the iPhone instead of a cinema camera. I feel like they didn't achieve a home video feel by using an iPhone. They didn't make it feel the way that they first film 28 Days Later did. But they have proven that you can make a polished cinema
13:08 quality film using an iPhone. But turns out Danny Bole has talked about this in interviews. I love the cameras and and experimenting. If you've got a reason within the story or within the idea of the way you want to do the story that allows you to employ technology, I'd love doing that because it's it's it's it opens up opportunities that are that are not necessarily classical. Yeah. Allowed us to be very light in our footprint in areas of the country that we wanted to suggest hadn't been touched for 28 years. you know, a crew coming in with a normal equipment level is going to make a big footprint and and so so we use drones a lot as well to so that we could film sequences that cameras couldn't possibly get those shots
13:53 without disrupting terribly the landscape and making it look like a herd of elephants had gone through. So, do you think that using an iPhone is democratizing cinema and giving power back to the little guy? or do you think that it's just a gimmick that helps you market your film? Let me know in the comments. And if you want to check out the filmmaker's game plan, you can do so below.
