Director Eschews Film, Shoots Music Video Entirely With iPhones
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODKbpiWbyUA]
It’s not like director Tom De Nolf doesn’t have 35mm film cameras and a bunch of other video-making tech at his disposal; no, De Nolf was so surprised by the video capability of his recently purchased 3GS that he chose to shoot the above music video using just three iPhones.
“Wow, this takes a really great video,” was his reaction after playing around with the 3GS, De Nolf told us. “It got the wheels churning.”
Then De Nolf — who has worked with Michael Phelps and can claim Honda and AT&T among his clients — shot the entire video in four hours, with nothing more than three iPhones, some stands and a MacBook Pro for playback.
“Basically, we pulled the camera out of our pocket and fired it up from there … and I thought that was so cool.”
Originally, De Nolf wanted ten iPhones to shoot the video with, but was only able to scrounge up three: his, and one each from the producer and director of photography (both of whom are named Allison).
“Man, we were really impressed,” De Nolf says of the result, and enthusiastically lauds the iPhone’s ability to shoot large chucks of video before running out of memory, the video’s “raw, 8mm home-movie quality” and the iPhone Camera App’s touch-screen exposure controls.
“We would get a halo-effect on his head … and that’s pretty amazing that you could do that with in-camera latitude.”
And, naturally, the clips were subsequently edited on MBPs running Final Cut Pro, making the production utterly Apple, from start to finish.
De Nolf says he’s going to do more shooting with the iPhone; keep your eyes peeled.
Update: Producer Allison Ashley tells me that editing was actually performed on a Mac Pro desktop.
When he was eight, Eli Milchman came home from frolicking in the Veld one day and was given an Atari 400. Since then, his fascination with technology has made him an intrepid early adopter of whatever charming new contraption crosses his path — which explains why he's Cult of Mac's test editor-at-large. He calls San Francisco home, where he works as a journalist and photographer. Eli has contributed to the pages of 
