“There is definitely a stigma in the industry. I’m really not going to say it from the audience’s perspective — a good movie is a good movie. But in the industry, I think there is a stigma.” She ended up working with Nick Cookewho she says, like herself, sees phone use as more of a challenge than an obstacle.
Stettner believes that the reluctance to take phone cameras seriously stems from the film industry’s fetish for high-end equipment. Using a professional camcorder can make your work feel “professional”, even if that’s not always the case. Students also go to film schools to use and learn about high-end cameras and lenses, so having to use smartphones doesn’t seem appealing.
However, using something as familiar and common as a phone can make it harder to think critically about the details of your footage. “Contemplation of the image—composition, volume, all—becomes a more consideration when you are dealing with something that cannot be captured immediately,” says Stettner. Basically, you have more opportunities to stop and think. It makes sense. We use our phones every day to read news, play games, reply to messages and record content. The camcorder is a focusing tool that allows you to unleash your creativity. A phone may not put you in the same mindset.
In control
Every year, phone manufacturers highlight improvements to their respective image processing algorithms that affect the look and feel of a video clip. That could include automatically brightening footage, increasing color saturation, or removing noise by smoothing details. Henwick says her team skipped all that proprietary processing and instead used an app called Filmic Pro to access the raw hardware in Xiaomi phones. “We are actually going to have two phones. We will focus on one phone and we will use Wi-Fi to control the main phone. It works very much like a normal crew, except the device fits in the palm of your hand.”
The removal of all Xiaomi processing gave Henwick and Cooke greater control over the look and feel of the film. However, there were still things the camera did that they couldn’t control. Smartphone cameras are designed to take great pictures no matter how poor our photography skills are, so they often “help” improve photos by automatically adjusting camera settings according to the How to enhance bad photos but break artistic attempts to break the rules. Cooke explained a scene where he intentionally wanted to keep an actor’s face in the dark, but the phone automatically compensates for the exposure to make them look better in a “shiny, beautiful, and shiny” way. The phone also continued to attempt to automatically correct the scene — even changing exposure in the middle of the scene — as the team was trying to make sure every frame was consistent.
The team found several ways to trick the camera into stopping doing this by illuminating scenes in a certain way or pointing the sensor at a light or dark surface to “reset” the camera’s exposure settings. . Usually, they only fix these problems in post-production, a process that Henwick says is comparable to what is done on other short films using cinema cameras.
