“Why I Shot My First Feature Film on An iPhone”
I recently connected with a filmmaker in our facebook group. He posted a trailer for his music documentary shot on an iPhone XS. When I saw the trailer, it really struck me as being exceptionally well made. I rented it and was really blown away.
So I invited the director, Shane Drake, to tell us more about the film and how he used the iPhone and Filmic Pro. I don’t know about you, but I’m always eager to hear how these tools are utilised in experienced hands.
“I that there’s a lot of pros to using an iPhone camera. It’s in your hand and ready to go.” Shane C. Drake
What is your previous experience as a filmmaker?
I’ve been shooting music videos predominantly for the last 20 years. I won my first big award in 2006, at the MTV VMAs for Video of the Year for a music video for a band called Panic! At the Disco, for song called “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”.
Before then, I was making a lot of low budget music videos on the DVX100, Panasonic’s flagship 24p camera. And so my filmmaking career started by finding an inexpensive resource to shoot my films on. In the beginning. Obviously, once I won that award and as my career developed I used 35mm, and 16mm and eventually all of that shifted straight over to digital.
I’m very used to filmmaking on a medium that’s easily accessible and allows you to not need the kind of big budgets that a studio requires to make films.
How did you come to make Rising Star?
I hit up my buddy Griffen House who I have known for years and been a fan of since he began. And I was talking about whether he wanted to make a music video. I was like, “You know I’d love to go out on the road with you if you have any tours coming up. And I would love to just shoot that. Just get some raw footage and see what we can do.”
And he was super on board, sent me some of his new music, which I loved. We decided we would do some sort of a music video. And then, as he sent me more tracks, I started to realise that these songs were more sound track elements. And more scoring elements than they were music video elements.
And maybe that was just a product of where I was artistically and what I was desiring to do. But I decided to see if he was interested in shooting a documentary. I’ve always wanted to do a long form. I’ve always wanted to just go on the road and just live with an artist for a while. I’ve done it for music videos but to do it for a longer period of time and really capture the behind the scenes of who they are, what they are doing and what makes them them.
And so when I pitched that to him he was also very excited. Truth be told he said it brought him to tears because he’s been wanting someone to tell his story for so long.
Why did you decide to use your iPhone?
We wanted to keep the price as low as possible. The point wasn’t to spend a lot of money but to have a lot of fun and make a product that is watchable, and feels like it has integrity; professionalism. And so I researched all the DSLR options, the Blackmagic Cinema options. I really wanted to be on a gimbal, or sort of a Steadicam apparatus of some sort.
The bigger the camera, the bigger that apparatus needs to be. And the more parts, the more things need to be charged. The less battery life, the more batteries you are always swapping out, the more cards you are swapping out…
And then it dawned on me. I had this wild idea that I would shoot the whole thing on my phone.
The phone allowed me so much control; allowed me not to have to have a lot of elements I’d need to bring in. A lot of people, a lot of crew, counting on a lot of different equipment. I could really put together a very scaled down Steadicam apparatus that I could just function and use myself.
With the phone I wouldn’t have to change cards. I would just have to dump the footage occasionally, so I would have a cleaner hard drive. Between that and a pretty significant battery life, the process was pretty fluid. I was basically able to shoot anywhere we were because we were on an iPhone. We weren’t on a big camera.
We could go in the subway, we could go in Times Square and not have issues, we could go in just about any area he was at. If I’d had a big crew, with cranes and jibs and dollies, that I have certainly captured with before – for live shows, for bigger artists. But for this, our footprint was so small, our needs were so small, the venues were very accommodating. And allowed us to get a lot of footage I probably wouldn’t ordinarily been able to get.
It allowed me to focus on him and allowed him to be more natural with me. Because it’s not like I have a big crew and lights and apparatus set up. I just have an iPhone on him which we are all very accustomed to speaking to these days. So, it allowed me to get his most natural self.
What other equipment did you use?
The other equipment I used was a Zhiyun Smooth 4. It was one of the gimbals that tied in directly to the software that I was using, which was FiLMiC Pro. Absolutely love it, I’ve been using it since it came out. It [Smooth 4] doesn’t work too well with the new phones because they’re a little heavy for it. But the XS worked great with the little counterweight.
What about lighting?
I chose to do all available lighting. Sort of throwback to Dogme filmmaking, back in the mid-90s. I didn’t want to bring lights and I didn’t want to have to get permission to use lights on stage. So I just found a way to use available lights, wherever we were. Whether we were in the car driving, or we were at a venue shooting a show, or I walking down the street, everything in that movie was available light.
How did you record audio?
I used a Rode Shotgun mic. But what I found with that mic was when it was attached to the gimbal, sometimes you got a buzz. Which I was able to get using audition, but it was a pain in the ass. In my next project, which I’ll talk about later, I opted to not use the Rode shotgun mic and use the Rode wireless Go mics that they have, which are awesome.
I mostly shot off the native audio, the native microphone in the iPhone. Most of the audio you hear in the movie is from the iPhone.
How many iPhones did you use?
I did have a 2nd iPhone which I used for the 2nd leg of his tours just for the live stuff. We ended up purchasing an iPhone XS Max because that had a bigger hard drive. And I brought on a buddy to assist and do 2nd camera work.
How did you use FiLMiC Pro?
So when I got the app, I played with all the settings and really tried to figure out how to get the best slowmo, and how to get footage with as little grain as possible. You know with the iPhone we have an aperture issue, so we’re always going to have issues with low lighting.
I also used ND filters when I was shooting outside. And again this ties in with how I used FiLMiC Pro. I wanted to shoot the whole film in 24 frames [per second] and 1/48 shutter, because I wanted the 180 degree simulation. So that it really felt filmic. Honestly, I just got a cheap variable ND filter that I clipped on to the phone for most of the exterior shots and it worked beautifully.
I used the highest bitrate, FiLMiC Extreme, and I shot it all in 4K.
How about FiLMiC Pro’s Log setting?
I also decided not to use Log. I purchased it but I didn’t shoot it because what I found with Log is, it just kinda cheats you into a mid zone that you still have to colour correct your way out of. And I’d rather not have to colour correct myself out of something and just shoot natural, and know what I’m getting from the beginning.
And from there, I’m already in a place that I know that I like. With Log I feel like it just cheats the parameters to make you think like you’re getting more stops. But really you have to colour correct for those in post anyway and you end up losing them.
So I’d rather just know from the beginning what I have and from there take the colour correction where the footage will allow it to go.
How do you deal with low light?
I don’t mind a little bit of grain. I find on the iPhone when we shoot with FiLMiC Pro, some of the grain you get ends up feeling a lot like 16mm film. And I like that, I think it’s cool looking. So I don’t really mind a little bit of grain, but too much can feel like a digital mess.
I tried to keep everything I shot at night under 100 ISO. But if I had to go higher I’d let myself go up to 200 ISO. Never went over 200. So everything at night is shot under 200 ISO. And if I really needed the extra boost, I would drop my shutter to 1/24.
There’s a little more motion tracers and that but it’s minimal. You really don’t notice it in the footage when put next to the 1/48.
How about audio mix and colour grade?
I also wanted to make sure the film felt raw and natural so I didn’t do a lot of colour correction. I tried to keep as much of it intact – with what we actually shot – as possible. And when it comes to sound, I did a lot of sound tweaking in Adobe Audition and Adobe Premiere Pro.
But honestly I’m not an incredible sound editor, so the sound is probably the biggest weak link of this film. But that being said, it still feels raw. You don’t get the idea – at least I believe so – that you feel like you’re there. You feel like you’re with him. You feel like you actually are enjoying these experiences with Griffen.
What was the budget for this film?
So this film was shot for about $20,000. That’s 20 days on the road, that’s AirBnB’s, that’s hotels, that’s food, gas. We travelled in a sprinter – which our executive producer owned – for both legs of the tour. And John was gracious enough to be our driver, for all that, which was fun.
The equipment costs were minimal, but we needed hard drives and we needed to get a new MacBook so we had an updated platform to actually edit on. For some, it’s still a lot of money and I get that. But for the scale of projects I’m used to working on, it was very low budget, it felt very grass roots and very manageable.
I did almost all the roles. It wasn’t like we hired people to do all the different things. I produced it, I shot it, I directed it, and then I also edited it.
How long did it take?
I watched every minute of the footage that I shot. And as I’m watching I’m writing notes and I end up with an 80 page document, just of notes. And what that does is, it gives me is – obviously an indication of what I need to go back to – but also key words in what I’m writing. And then when I’m done and I have that whole 80 page document, I can type in a key word like “Griffen’s mom”. And it will take me to all of the pages that talk about Griffen’s mom and I don’t have to search and remember where the footage is.
For me, I really enjoyed it, because it gave me a chance to go relive those moments. And not only relive them, but really dive into them and process them. Because as I’m looking at them and as I’m watching them, I’m writing them. I’m taking notes – things I thought were good, great or bad.
So the edit took all of about a month and a half. I spent the next few months just really honing in on getting people’s opinions and trying to see family and friends and see what they thought of it. Overall, the process – from concept to shooting to editing to releasing to gauging results – was about 1 year.
Why did you choose Amazon for distribution?
And then came the daunting task of how to release it. Do we sell it? Does someone buy this kind of thing? Is there festivals for this?
We decided, since this whole thing had been DIY from the beginning, and very grass roots, that we wanted to keep that in our distribution. So we decided to self-release on video on demand. So we released it on Vimeo, and we released it on Amazon Prime Video Direct.
It’s a hard process getting people to pay attention to a movie or even pay $3 to rent it. Let alone like $10 to buy it. It’s really like a commitment for people. Because, “what if it sucks? What if this makes me not like my favourite artist again? What if this is just a big waste of time?”
And people are very discerning about where they put their entertainment money. And so in January we decided to change the Amazon offering to Prime members. And that really opened up the door to a lot of viewers. We’ve since amassed almost 60 reviews. I think all of them but 1 are 5 stars and the 1 that isn’t is also super entertaining to read, so it’s fine.
Will you be using iPhones again?
John and I, my business partner, decided after we made Rising Star that we were going to make another project. We wanted to do something else. We had so much fun and it was so “easy”, and so we decided that we’re going to start shooting a docu series.
It’s a 5 part docu series, where we will focus each episode (each episode is about 45 – 60 minutes long) on a new artist. And follow them for a leg of their tour. And capture them, capture their music, capture the shows, and do sort of a mini version of what we did with Rising Star, but for multiple artists, for multiple genres, across a series platform.
For this series we again used the iPhone. This time we actually bought phones specifically for the filming, so I didn’t have to use my personal phone. So we bought 2 x iPhone 11 Pro.
What do you think of the iPhone 11 Pro?
A better camera because now the tight lens actually has a better f stop. The f stop on the tight lens for the iPhone XS is really rough, it’s really slow. And ended up being really hard to use and incorporate with the wide angle.
I don’t use the super wide angle that much. It is in the docu series a little bit, but it gets very grain because again the f stop is not great, it’s a slow lens.
Any other new kit?
I switched to the Zhiyun Crane M2 gimbal. Which is an awesome gimbal. I love it.
And then for this I did do a lot of my audio on the Rode Wireless Go microphones. They’re incredible.
Pros & Cons of using an iPhone?
I that there’s a lot of pros to using an iPhone camera. It’s in your hand and ready to go, right now. There’s a learning curve but it’s manageable. It’s something you can figure out. And you can figure out in relatively short order.
You don’t require a crew, the equipment that attaches to it is easy to research in the different forums.
Some of the cons, obviously that’s an aperture issue. That’s not going to change, so long as the phones have to shoot through a hole this big, because of the nature of the size constraints. But that’s fine. That’s not been problematic enough for me to say ditch it.
Obviously I have projects where I shoot on the big RED cameras and ARRI cameras. Obviously that’s a different experience. That’s a few hundred thousand dollars for 3 minutes as opposed to something you can do on your existing phone camera for free.
What themes were you trying to explore?
We often see the stories of the Coldplays or the Rolling Stones. These huge success stories, where we feel like “that’s so cool, that they went from here to here [low to high]”. That story is an amazing story but I feel like it’s been told. It’s been told often and it’s been told well, and I don’t feel like I necessarily have anything to add to that narrative.
And we’ve also heard of the shining stars that burned out. And we see these sad stories of crash and burn. Again, that’s another story that’s been told well. And I don’t know that I had anything new to bring to that.
What I found is that there’s this middle ground. This life of an artist. The touring artists. And there’s countless artists in this category that make a living on the road, playing shows to anywhere from 50 to 500 people. And this is what they do, day in day out. Sometimes up to 200 or 300 times a year.
I wanted to capture his [Griffen House] humanity, as well as the subject of this world of being a travelling musician – not in super stardom and not in failure – but in the middle. There was no better subject at the time than Griffen and he fit that bill so perfectly.
Obviously there’s some lows there some highs, but that’s the reality of any career. We all have the highs and lows. We all have that thing we aspire to. Did we pursue it? Did we pursue it for a little but then quit? Did we pursue it to our fullest? And we almost reached it, or we did reach it, or we overshot it.
The levels of that story can be told by everyone. Whether you’re an electrician or a teacher. Or being a doctor or being an activist. Any level of dream that’s existed in your heart and pursued to some degree, with varying success or failure.
Allows you to relate to this movie.
Watch the full interview with Shane here:
Eager to learn more?
Join our weekly newsletter featuring inspiring stories, no-budget filmmaking tips and comprehensive equipment reviews to help you turn your film projects into reality!
