In 2018, Apple launched Shot on iPhone for the first time during the Spring Festival. The film was directed by Chen Kexin. It was a story of a conductor who spent 3 minutes at the station to watch his son during the Spring Festival. It was very popular and received numerous praises.
The 2019 Shot on iPhone Spring Festival movie, directed by Jia Zhangke, tells the story of a young man returning to the city from his hometown after the Chinese New Year. His mother brought a whole bucket of hometown eggs to his son. The same story is touching and full of family affection.
In the next two years of 2020 and 2021, Apple’s Spring Festival Shot on iPhone film will be more candid, abandoning a large number of professional optical external lenses, and begin to demonstrate the iPhone’s ability to directly output video. For ordinary people, how to use the iPhone to shoot videos has far more reference value than the first two years.
Every year I write about the New Year film about Shot on iPhone, I actually mentioned this point: Whether it’s Shot on iPhone or Shot on other devices, Shot is the key, and more important than Shot is that you can Have the eyes to discover the story, and the heart to dare to try with the shooting tools at hand.
But then I discovered that although this sentence is correct, it is still a space hole. The video ability of the professional team is not comparable to ordinary people. The experience of watching Apple’s annual Shot on iPhone New Year movie is like watching a video tutorial taken by a B-Box or a master craftsman. I know how to do it, but I don’t know how to do it.
Until some time ago, Apple invited 6 Chinese college students from Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Wuhan. With the assistance of iPhone photographers Xiaobei and Derrick, they created three short videos on the theme of “River City•City” . I chatted with these college students selected by Apple and got some inspiration for shooting with iPhone.
To put it simply, the 6 college students are divided into three groups, two in each group. One of them will be a photography student, and the other will be a common university student in various majors around us. The three short films have different styles, but they were all shot with iPhone 12 Pro Max, and almost no professional imaging equipment and lighting equipment were used.
For ordinary people to create with iPhone or any mobile phone with the main video function, these three short films are more reference and reproducible than Apple’s annual New Year short films.
“Chu Sheng”, a 16-year-old young Han opera actor Cai Yangfan unfolds. By recording his life, study, rehearsal, makeup and performance during the story, it expresses the inheritance of Han opera, a traditional local drama situation.
From my point of view, this is the most “prime” of the three videos. It doesn’t seem to be too much toned, and it is closer to the straight-out colors of the iPhone. Judging from the presentation of the lens, there is no fixed tripod, almost all of them are handheld.
The moving point of this short film lies in the people recorded in the video.
If you use professional imaging equipment for the performance of the actors filmed at the end of the video, the entire mirror movement process will be very cumbersome and need to be divided into many sections, but the iPhone is a convenient handheld device, which is very suitable for one shot.
The “Deshengqiao” records aunt Xia Guangling who has lived and worked in Deshengqiao in Wuhan for many years. Video creator Song Ci said that this is his first time shooting a documentary, and found that it is worth trying to record life through the lens, not presupposing what happened when shooting, and watching the changes.
Actually, the mobile phone that everyone uses the most to record the moments of their lives is the mobile phone, because this is the lightest shooting device, although the iPhone 12 Pro Max does have many hard advantages, such as the ProRAW format can be fully retained The picture details of the photo, the video can be shot in 4K, and Dolby Vision can be shot.
But I think, in fact, any mobile phone, good or bad, can record life. If you already have a lot of small videos you made in your photo album, you will look through it from time to time and you will understand what I mean. Because what you are recording is not just the picture, but the memory of the scene at that time.
At the event site, I had a lot of communication with the creator of this film, and I specifically asked him the questions that appeared during the filming process. The answer I got was the same as that of the director of photography when I interviewed Joker in 18 years. It was also the filming director of Zhou Xun that year. Lawrence Sher, the director of photography for the Apple Spring Festival short film, said something strikingly similar at the time.
At the time, Lawrence Sher said that cutting down the material is like killing his own child, but he must not be soft. There are indeed many shots that are great, but they should not be included. The more experience you have, the more decisive you will be. . To some extent, letting go is also an important skill.
Rong Zhe also took a lot of shots when he was creating “Bridge to Victory,” because shooting with a mobile phone is too easy, and it is easy to take a lot of pictures. But in the end, a lot of them were cut off.
This point is actually very important for users who really want to use iPhone to shoot video [Filming]. To complete a complete short film, not only the previous plan, the intermediate shooting, and the final editing process, but also willing Cut.
The third short film “Chinese Girl” is my favorite among these three works. Whether it is the rhythm or the shooting technique, the maturity of this short film is almost not much different from that of professional video creators. The author Xu Yanhao studied in the Department of Photography at the Shanghai Film Academy of Shanghai University, and was able to use the advantages of the iPhone as a small handheld device to shoot a large number of unique perspectives in the film.
These three groups of college students who used iPhones to shoot short films all mentioned the advantages of the Apple ecology for the entire creative project. Shooting with iPhone, uploading to MacBook with Airdrop, and editing with final cut pro. This kind of workflow is indeed difficult to achieve with other hardware. Of course, the absence of Apple equipment is not a reason not to shoot the stories you want to shoot, but it is true that in Apple’s ecology, the ecological synergy between hardware and software reduces the hard obstacles to outputting ideas as much as possible.
Of course, whether it’s Shot on iPhone or Shot on other devices, the Shot action is the key, and more important than the Shot action is that you have the eyes to discover the story and the courage to try with the shooting tools at hand. heart.
You may already be working, and indeed you don’t have as much free time as college students, or your mobile phone is not the model that can record the best quality videos. But compared to reminiscing about lifeFor some of the key moments in the thigh, I regret that I don’t have any eternal records of any other medium except my mind. It is extremely important to capture the moments that impress me.