Lights, camera, action - and smartphone film-making

RECENTLY, it was reported that the film Suicide Squad had a budget of around US$175 million, but flopped with disappointing box office results. It joins extremely high budget films in the US$200 million range like Christopher Nolan's Tenet, Wonder Woman 1984, and others. No wonder most people think that in order to tell a good story with film, one needs an astronomical budget.

If you are a Hollywood director with a huge budget, then professional cameras made by specialist firms like Arri, Red, and Sony are still needed. Some old school directors like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino still prefer celluloid film, and not digital cameras. But for indie film-makers with little to no budgets, the good news is that if there is decent lighting and no large dark and light contrasts, the latest generation of smartphones are able to do a decent job.

Even indie film-makers like Sean Baker and Steven Soderbergh (of Oceans Eleven fame) have made full feature films using their smartphones. A Netflix film by Soderbergh called High Flying Bird was shot mostly with an older iPhone 8. With some limitations of course.

Cameras like DSLRs and mirrorless cameras often sport one-inch rectangular image sensors to allow these to gather more light even in dark conditions. These large image sensors also allow a visual effect called bokeh, a Japanese term that means that the subject being photographed is in focus, but the background is not.

Smartphones, with their smaller image sensors, have a hard time achieving bokeh. Some are able to achieve it with software, but with mixed results. Recently, the German camera firm Leica announced that its smartphone would carry a full one-inch image sensor, like those used in DSLRs.

Top-of-the-line smartphones now have precision optics from Leica, Zeiss, and Hasselblad to minimise optical distortions.

AFFORDABLE STORYTELLING

To fight blur, mechanical and electronic image stabilisation capabilities are added. Zoom allows distant objects to be viewed up close. Computational photography lets these cameras take multiple images, and combine these to remove noise. Features like Dolby Vision and HDR (high dynamic range) give phones real-time colour correction of a 10-bit colour image. Higher 4K/8K resolution add further to the video quality. Anamorphic lenses, coupled with filters, give the video a desired cinema-like aesthetic. Future image sensors from Sony, et cetera, will even have lenses on each pixel.

What if a person is wearing a blue sweater and seated on a similarly coloured blue sofa (blue on blue)? A regular camera would have to guess where the blue sweater ends and the blue sofa begins. Some phones now employ laser ranging (Lidar) which uses a weak laser to get the distance between the subject and the camera. With Lidar, images can show where the person's torso ends and the sofa fabric begins.

But what if a director cannot be with the actor in the same place like during this pandemic. Is film-making already impossible? Obviously not, but it is not a perfect situation by any means.

Some tech companies now sell software that lets a director control the actor's smartphone camera in another place, adjust focus and exposure, and view the video remotely in real time. In the future, a robotic tripod could allow control of the pan and tilt of the remote smartphone camera. This can easily be developed anywhere. Plus, with cheap green screens, many people are now able to make Zoom videos with different backgrounds by replacing the green background with another background.

While it is true that Hollywood film-making can be an expensive proposition, developments in mobile phone technology have made it affordable for anyone with a smartphone to tell their stories and make their own films. At some point, the technology will become so good that only experts can tell what type of camera was used to make the film.

So, if you don't have US$200 million but have a fairly decent smartphone camera, a bunch of actors, and a good story, go ahead and make your film. It won't be perfect down to the pixel level, but most people just want a story well told anyway.

• The writer is a Philippines-based tech columnist, author, playwright and screenwriter.