Shooting a feature-length film with one or four iPhones has been done several times. How about 20? Director Danny Boyle has… and the results will soon be before viewers when 28 Years Later releases on June 20.
The filmmaker has used several modern filmmaking techniques, including filming some sequences using the popular Apple device. There are also three rigs that can hold eight, 10 or 20 iPhones at once.
iPhones, in the hands of Boyle, are no gimmick as he returns to the series after directing the 2002 original, 28 Days Later, for which a digital video camcorder was used. IGN reports the movie uses a mix of regular cameras, drones and iPhones.
“I never say this, but there is an incredible shot in the second half [of the film] where we use the 20-rig camera, and you’ll know it when you see it,” Boyle told IGN.
For him, the 20-camera rig is “basically a poor man’s bullet time”. He told IGN that it allows flexibility for filmmakers. The phones are light and can be mounted easily on cranes or a camera dolly.
The zombie opus finds Boyle working with his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. He manages to achieve a 2.76:1 widescreen aspect ratio on the new film, which is mostly used for Imax or Ultra Panavision 70mm epics. The original 28 Days Later was shot on miniDV in 4:3.
“Wherever it gives you 180 degrees of vision of an action, and in the editing, you can select any choice from it, either a conventional one-camera perspective or make your way instantly around reality, time-slicing the subject, jumping forward or backward for emphasis,” the director told IGN. “As it’s a horror movie, we use it for the violent scenes to emphasise their impact.”
There have been a number of notable films shot on iPhones, like Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015), Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane (2018) and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Fursat. A number of short filmmakers are making films using iPhones, examples of which can be seen in the ‘Filmed on iPhone’ segment at MAMI Select. However, Boyle has a significantly larger budget than any of these films, and it pushes the experiment like no one has done before.
