> This seems like wishful thinking: a professional filmmaker or photographer is unlikely to want to deal with all the restrictions that an iPhone provides when they can just hire one of the many professional movie cameras available.
There has been a cinema-released feature film, Tangerine, made only using phones. But yeah, equipment hire is likely to be only a fraction of a even an indy film's budget, compared to logistics, sets, crew, etc.
It wasn't that long ago that budding filmmakers' had to spend thousands on film stock, limiting the number of takes they could to film and often limiting them to black and white. I'm thinking of enthusiasts who would later be given bigger budgets, such as Peter Jackson and Kevin Smith. Peter Jackson did use a iPod to make Lord of the Rings, but only to move footage across the last mile of London to his editing suite.
There was that period from the late nineties where digital footage couldn't yet complete with film cameras, but were extensively used for sports videos and the like, with home computers capable of non-linear editing lowering the bar to entry.
These days we have directors like Gareth Edwards, whose feature film Monsters was filmed on 'prosumer' cameras and edited on laptops. Equipment was $15,000, total budget $500,000. Indeed, the CGI monsters were created in the laptops, no huge render farm required. Like Peter Jackson before him, he's since been given the reigns of a big budget film franchise, Star Wars.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
