Soderbergh Reveals Issues with iPhone Filmmaking

Steven Soderbergh’s 2nd iPhone shot feature film HIGH FLYING BIRD came out on Netflix last week. We rushed to watch it the day of release, as the trailer promised a visual feast. I even subscribed to the 30 day free Netflix trial so I could watch it.

Most film writers still talk about the “limitations” of smartphone video cameras. And Indiewire’s Chris O’Falt is no exception. In his recent article about High Flying Bird he says:

“The iPhone’s limitations are noticeable in wide shots with great depth of field and shots with a wide dynamic range of light.” Chris O’Falt

First of all I would question why “wide shots with a great depth of field” is a limitation. But yes, it’s hard to get shallow depth of field with current smartphone lenses and sensors. Of course you can mount large telephoto lenses, but that seems to me to undermine the advantage of the iPhone.

It’s also true that the dynamic range of smartphone sensors is lower than those used in a dedicated video camera, such as a DSLR or Arri or something. And, by the way, FiLMiC Pro are working on improving this.

So really, this sentence appears to be somewhat parroted by Chris – it’s something he has heard but doesn’t really understand. And this is the problem with people claiming knowledge of something when they don’t fully understand it. I mean, is he watching High Flying Bird going “oh yeah, you can see that wide dynamic range of light problem right there”, just because he read it somewhere?

And that’s the problem with everyone claiming to know what “cinematic” means without looking into the history of cinema. Apparently cinematic now means Bokeh, shallow depth of field, smooth dolly shots and lens flares. Which is great, as it means none of us have to go and study film now to become a cinematographer…

Incidentally, Alfonso Cuarón was recently awarded Best Cinematographer by BAFTA for his work on his own film Roma. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember it has a lot of “wide shots with a great depth of field”.

Back to Soderbergh…

He’s been talking to Indiewire about shooting the way he shot High Flying Bird differently to Unsane:

“I wanted to shoot anamorphic, and have a much cleaner sort of presentation,” said Soderbergh in an interview with IndieWire. “Much slicker, much more of a kind of normal look.”

Well, that shows. It’s certainly more carefully shot. The framing is very precise.

Soderbergh: “The iPhone still seemed to me a pretty natural fit for that approach. It still is, in my mind, in terms of the scale of it, the speed that was necessary to execute it, in the time we had allotted.”

Which confirms what I was saying a few days ago about time = money, and very much so in filmmaking.

Soderbergh: “I could point out many shots in ‘High Flying Bird’ where using a more traditional approach with normal-size cameras would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do. To get the lens where I want, or to be moving in a way that I want to move and, you know, have the camera reach multiple destinations without either somebody getting hurt, or the shot being compromised because of the size of the equipment. So, it seemed like a natural fit to me.

“We’re in a very narrow path, we’re moving very quickly, and then as they sort of peel off from us, we sort of move away from them, and he goes into his office, and the camera sort of retreats. With a normal size dolly, which weighs 350 pounds, that becomes dangerous, potentially. Like, somebody could get hurt. And being able to take the corner to start to separate from them the way that we did… we could have been there for hours.”

Soderbergh quotes Orson Welles: “‘I don’t want to wait on the tool, the tool should wait on me,’ I get very frustrated when it takes a long time to execute it. Like, as soon as I feel it, I want to shoot it. And so, that’s one of the biggest benefits of this method – the time from the idea to seeing an iteration of it is incredibly short, like, a minute, like, maybe less. For me, the energy that that creates on set, and I think on screen, is huge.”

“Soderbergh’s lighting package, iPhone-shot or not, has been stripped down to a 12-inch by 12-inch LED panel in recent years.” Chris O’Falt

Soderbergh: “My attitude has always been, ‘So, you think you can improve on real life? Like, the way things look in the real world, you think you can do better than that?’ I’ve always been amused by people who take that approach.”

And so to the issue with iPhone (I don’t know if the issue is with all smartphones).

“…there was one problematic aspect of shooting with the iPhone that Soderbergh felt was inexcusable. Like other filmmakers, ‘High Flying Bird’ was shot using the Filmic Pro App, which bypasses the consumer auto controls of the iPhone’s camera app, allowing cinematographers to control and lock into a specific shutter speed and ISO. But it can’t override – and the app developers have tried to work with Apple on this – the way the camera’s sensor adjusts, mid-shot, to changes in light.” Chris O’Falt

Soderbergh: “If somebody walks past a window, or you pan through a light, it, even though it’s supposed to be frozen, [the sensor] responds. What makes it even worse is it’s not the entire frame that responds, it’s pieces of the frame. I spoke to Apple about it, and explained to them they have to address it if they’re really serious about people using these things to make movies going forward.

“I thought about documenting how many hours it took in the DI (digital intermediate), and what that cost, and sending Apple a bill, going, ‘You guys should cover this. Like, you know, this isn’t my fault,’ But I didn’t do that.”

And so Soderbergh is hoping professional cameras will soon come out which have the same ease of use and small size as smartphone cameras:

“I’m hoping this year we’re now going to see a kind of combination of a capture device that’s certainly not much bigger than your Zoom recorder [the Zoom H6] with a full-sized sensor,” said Soderbergh. “I know RED’s doing that with the Hydrogen and I’m sure they won’t be alone. But that, to me, is really going to be something, because now I can put the lens anywhere I want, and I have selective focus, and I can do all those things that I like to do. So, to me, it’s exciting as hell.”

Interesting to hear. Although I thought one of the reasons the RED Hydrogen flopped was because the camera was no better than other top smartphones. But I think it will only be a matter of time before camera makers try to create a camera with the ease of use, size and flexibility of a smartphone camera – but with all the controls of a professional camera. If they then charge $3000 for it – that’s lunch money for someone like Soderbergh. But we will have to see. As far as I know, there are no such cameras coming out in the near future, unless you include mirrorless cameras which are also smartphones…

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