Sorry for the radio silence last week, but maybe it’s for the best. Toni and I had shot most of the film by last Friday, but we saved some special effects shots for a third night of shooting, which we knocked out Monday.
So now I can give you the full breakdown of this no-budget short film shot entirely on my iPhone, entirely in our living room, with just the two of us.
I learned a lot on this one.
By the way, if you want to see my first iPhone short film, made under very similar conditions – you can watch right here.
More Breath, Less Stress
This was probably the least stressful narrative shoot I’ve done in years, which was my goal!
After Oliver Brody, I really wanted to swing in the opposite direction production-wise. That film was sprawling and ambitious and exhausting in all the ways you’d expect. So this time I wanted to see what would happen if I stripped the process down to the bare minimum: no crew outside of Toni helping with BTS and art department stuff, no locations, no rentals, no budget.
Just a tiny movie in the living room.
And if you strategically design a film to be essentially free, then there’s really no reason to force the process to feel like a Hollywood set. You can slow down and have fun with it because you’re not bleeding money every hour.
Speaking of time, let’s talk a little more about the schedule of this one…
I originally thought this was going to be a 1-night shoot. Then I started building the shot list and schedule using my automatic scheduling template (still by far my favorite way to schedule any shoot).
Very quickly, I realized that was completely unrealistic. I had a LOT of shots planned. So 2 days was looking more realistic. And normally, that’s what I would have done…
But then I remembered how the Witchfish shoot went.
Very similar setup: 2 nights, shooting in my house, mostly at night, basically no crew. Yet I was needlessly stressed during that production because I kept trying to force the shoot into an artificially tight schedule. I didn’t want to repeat that mistake this time.
So I gave myself a third night.
That decision changed the entire experience. The shoot became fun and appropriately low-stakes. We even had drinks in the middle of the shoot. Why not? It’s a no-budget film in our living room after all…
Besides the schedule, another big stressor on Witchfish was lighting.
Lighting is such a pain when you’re basically shooting solo, especially on night interiors. So this time, I created one basic “universal” lighting setup for the whole project. Then I could just moved around one little battery-powered light as needed to tweak each setup. Occasionally I’d bring in another light just to throw a shape onto the floor or wall if the image was feeling too flat, but the entire lighting approach was built around speed and simplicity.
And it worked out! I think the lighting looks nice (nice enough anyway), and it felt easy, even with our 2-person team.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make filmmaking more sustainable for myself long term. How do I reduce the parts of the process that create unnecessary stress and overwhelm? How do I preserve the parts that are actually creatively fulfilling?
This project felt like a really good testing ground for that mindset, and I plan to push even further in this direction moving forward.
How much can I get away with before the films start to suffer? We’ll find out…
The Minimalist iPhone Rig
I’m obviously going to make a full YouTube breakdown covering the production, so I won’t go too crazy here. But I do think this will probably be my last iPhone short film for a while.
Not because the footage looks bad (I think it holds up great actually). The issue is more the workflow.
I shot the entire thing on my iPhone 15 Pro in ProRes LT, at 4K, using the Blackmagic Camera app. Since the ProRes files are huge, I recorded everything onto a 1TB external SSD that was designed for smartphones. The key advantage of this SSD was a USB-C passthrough port on the bottom, which allowed me to still plug in my wireless mic receiver while recording externally.
So the whole rig was basically:
- iPhone 15 Pro
- TWOPAN 1TB External SSD
- Hollyland Lark Max 2 USB C receiver
- Little Ulanzi MagSafe tripod (I love this thing)
That’s it. The whole thing is only slightly bigger than the iPhone itself.
And I wanted to keep it that way. I have zero interest in attaching cages, hubs, batteries, handles, lenses etc to my phone. At that point you’re basically rebuilding a cinema camera out of a phone, which totally defeats the purpose of shooting on the phone.
But the biggest issue I kept running into was battery life.
Once the battery started getting low, the rhythm of production completely changed. We’d have to stop and fast charge the phone, shoot a few more setups, stop again, recharge again… over and over.
Not being able to hot swap batteries is the single biggest downside of iPhone filmmaking compared to using an actual camera.
That said, there’s still something creatively exciting about making a film with the device that’s already in your pocket all the time.
And if you’re anything like me, seeing filmmakers push low-end tools to their limits is way more inspiring than watching someone casually shoot a film on $100k worth of gear with a full crew.
It just makes filmmaking feel more achievable.
On to the edit (on a deadline)
One unexpected advantage of stretching the production to three days was that it allowed me to build an assembly edit after day two.
That turned out to be really valuable because we were planning to physically alter our couch during the final night for some special effects, and I wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed any important moments before making those reshoots impossible.
Thankfully, the assembly edit already looks really promising. The footage holds up well and, more importantly, my mediocre acting doesn’t completely derail the movie.
I’ve got a sponsor attached to the release, so we agreed the film will go live May 18th, which means I need to move pretty quickly in post. I’ve been buried finishing another project’s edit, but fortunately that is finally wrapping up too.
So now it’s time for fun stuff! Cleaning up the edit, getting creative with the sound design, some wire removals in After Effects, and then hopefully a proper Resolve grade if I can squeeze it in… Although realistically, I’ll end up doing another quick-and-dirty Premiere grade considering the time constraints.
Anyways, the film drops May 18th barring any disasters. And I’ll hopefully have the full behind-the-scenes breakdown the following week, and maybe even a post-production breakdown after that.
But already I consider this project a big win in my ongoing attempt to make filmmaking less overwhelming, more sustainable, and still entertaining and crowd-pleasing at the end of the day.
More projects like this coming soon.
Favorites this week:
📱 App: Blackmagic Camera App
Shouting this out because they recently added camera control to the Apple Watch! A super handy feature for the making of this short. It’s actually amazing how many features they’ve added to the app since it first launched. My go-to camera app on my iPhone when shooting something serious.
🔧 Tool: My Automatic Shot List & Schedule Template
I’m still so proud of this thing! Scheduling a film used to be my least favorite part of pre-pro, and this just makes it so easy (dare I say fun?!). It definitely saved me a lot of time and frustration planning this 70 setup little shoot.
Let’s make some movies.
-Kent
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