Last week, Apple released a Fursat, a musical love story shot entirely on the iPhone 14 Pro. This 30-minute film is a Bollywood-style musical celebrating the power of love and is directed by award-winning Bollywood director Vishal Bhardwaj. It has Ishaan and Wamiqa Gabbi in the lead roles.
Supported by a cast and crew of famous Bollywood personalities, the film contains all the ingredients of popular cinema, including songs and choreographed dances, which are an integral part of Bollywood, brought together on a scale never seen before for a film not commercial, according to Apple.
This uses the iPhone 14 Pro’s Action mode which offers stable and smooth video even if you’re capturing in the middle of the action. It provides even more stabilization in situations where the person capturing the video is moving around a lot, such as running.
It also uses Cinematic Mode which enables a beautiful depth of field effect and automatic focus shifts on video in an easy and intuitive way for cinema-style moments providing more immersive storytelling. It now works in 4K and has better semantic rendering with better results on hair and glasses. For more creative control, focus can be changed during and after capture. Cinematic mode also records in Dolby Vision HDR.
Regarding Fursat, the director, Vishal Bhardwaj, said:
A traditional film camera comes with 10 people, 3 assistants and 10 boxes of lenses… you can’t move around. You can’t be fast. The iPhone freed me in that sense. The action mode was the biggest surprise for me. In Fursat we have covered a lot in action mode. If you see the raw footage, the visual is so shocking and unsettling. In Action mode, it’s so smooth. You have to see it to believe it.
I’ve never had that kind of scale in my movies before. And it can tell you about the scale the iPhone can achieve. As a device, it takes you out of the limitations we had when we were growing up. We didn’t have the luxury that the iPhone now affords all budding filmmakers.
Cinematographer Swapnil Sonawane said:
I had no idea how much the iPhone could handle, but the way it did it was just fantastic. I think the action mode is the most amazing update. So that it fits in the hand and rotates with all its might while looking at the actor, extremely stable shots can be obtained, without an external gimbal.
The way the cinematic mode changes focus is the same as the focus puller would, it’s emotional focus, which is absolutely stunning.
Cast and crew profiles.
Srivatsan Sridhar
Srivatsan Sridhar is a mobile technology enthusiast with a passion for mobile phones and mobile apps. He uses the phones he reviews as his main phone. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram See all posts by Srivatsan Sridhar
