A TV director just revealed that he and his crew “got away with” using an iPhone to shoot much of an episode of murder-mystery comedy The Afterparty on Apple TV+.
Season 2, episode 8 of the show benefited from the sense of iPhone “found footage” because it takes place mostly during a wedding, so they took pains to make it look like some amateur shot it.
Director ‘got away with’ shooting whole Episode of The Afterparty on iPhone
The Afterparty uses a different character’s perspective and a different filming style in each episode to dangle clues about who committed the season’s murder.
Apple TV+ described season 2 this way:
In Season 2, a wedding is ruined when the groom is murdered and every guest is a suspect. Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) returns to help Aniq (Sam Richardson) and Zoë (Zoë Chao) solve whodunnit by questioning family members, star-crossed lovers and business partners, and hearing each suspect’s retelling of the weekend, each with their own unique perspective and visual style.
Director Eric Appel (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story) recently shared how he had to fight the studio to get away with shooting so much of season 2’s episode 8 on iPhone, according to ComicBook.com. You can watch his video interview on that site.
Had to look like amateur-hour wedding footage
The episode takes place largely at a wedding, shown through footage captured by amateur videographer Kyler (or so it had to look to viewers).
Appel emphasized how he had to get the camera operator to “dumb it down” so it would look like some 17-year-old kid holding the iPhone vertically (portrait mode) shot it.
“One of my big pet peeves is when I see iPhone footage in a movie or TV show and it doesn’t look like real iPhone footage, it looks like it was shot with an Alexa or something,” he said. “It’s just a lot slicker. I went through great lengths to try to make this actually look like it was shot by some 17 year old kid holding it vertically.”
Appel said it took some convincing to get agreement on using the iPhone’s native camera app, as well:
This took a little bit of convincing, but we shot with like the native iPhone camera app. I remember everyone wanted to shoot with Filmic Pro. So we’d have more control over the raw image. And I was like, ‘It’s gotta look authentic. Like when you pinch to zoom in, we have to see that moment when the lenses change and there’s still that little blip and things go out of focus.’ Like, so, you know, I did take it very seriously and, you know, and try to give an authentic found-footage experience.
Watch The Afterparty on Apple TV+
Even though our critic despises it, you can watch all of The Afterparty season 1 and 8 episodes of season 2 — including the iPhone one, “Feng” — on Apple TV+. The new season’s episode 9 comes out Friday.
Apple TV+ is available by subscription for $6.99 with a seven-day free trial. You can also get it via any tier of the Apple One subscription bundle. For a limited time, customers who purchase and activate a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch can enjoy three months of Apple TV+ for free.
After first airing in November 2019, “Apple TV+ became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 299 wins and 1,451 award nominations and counting,” the service said.
Those include multi-Emmy Award-winning comedy Ted Lasso and historic Oscar Best Picture winner CODA.
