First Ever Short Film Shot & Edited on iPhone 3GS

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, and a fade out.

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!

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• iphone
• music
• michael
• jackson
• funny
• video

[iphonefilmcrew]

thanks for the comments!

Yes I did the entire filming and editing on the iPhone 3GS. Then I took the clips into iMovie to assemble them into 1 clip, then uploaded it to youtube. You can do everything on the iPhone except join multiple clips into one

[XtremeFunniness]

Nice i mean popintless but nice man, better than my videos

[MrRudnik28]

nice men..

[iPhoneFF]

Submit your film to the Worlds First Film Festival

Ruben

iPhoneFF.com

[J0llyR0ger]

AWESOME!!!!!

[SonOfTheSystem]

random or what? :P good quallity

[MichaelLorenger]

Great film, check out reeldirector for the 3gs, you can do it all. See my last vid if ya like, it was all done on the phone!

[WalkFoley]

This could have been done so much better with a bit more planning. Did you see the Play video by BJSR?

So much better.

[zamorkianwarrior]

yep you can can do that all on another phone too except the trimming the video part which only the iphone 3gs has the capability over any other phone

[aznlife72]

wow really nice quality!...so it's all put together on the iphone? without use of any computer?? how about uploading it is it also done on iphone?