Short Film Shows Powerful Video Features On An iPhone 6 Plus

Oregon based photographer and filmmaker Ben Canales decided to take his shiny new iPhone 6 Plus to the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains to create a short film to show off the power of the new pop tart sized phablet. The resulting footage is great, but is Ben in fear of losing some business to iPhone cinematographers?

With so many built in features, from timelapse to 240 FPS super slow motion, the iPhone 6 Plus video features can help make even the most video challenged users create some pretty cool stuff. But even for an experienced cinematographer like Ben Canales, the ease of use and feature set made shooting video enjoyable again. 

"As someone who uses a video camera in all sorts of ways about 6 days a week- playing with the iPhone 6 Plus made me feel like an 6 yr old with a cool new toy. The ease of use paired with very powerful in-phone functions is so well knit together that it feels like cheating going from shooting 240 fps to timelapse to stabilized video so easily."

Ben decided leave his Sony FS700 in it's Pelican case as he explored around the Sierras with a small group of well known timelapse film makers. The amount of high end film making equipment between the group was staggering, but with incliment weather overhead and lots of moving on the ground, the rest of the team decided to leave the equipment packed up, leaving Ben and his iPhone 6 Plus on a mini tripod the main source of footage. 

The results are beautiful, but will an iPhone 6 Plus spur a new generation of filmmakers that could take jobs from a well established production company? Ben tells me:

Is the iPhone 6+ amazing? YES. Would I bring it to a job shooting for a client? No. It will shoot 240fps, but it degrades and is not what you’d want full size in a polished video. The in-camera stabilizer in the Instagram Hyperlapse app is amazing, but it exports final video in 720 not 1080. Timelapse looks great when the conditions are stable, but changing light has the phone struggling to smoothly change exposures following the light. So yes, it’s jaw-dropping awesome what’s packed in this big phone, and we will probably see some amazing footage and videos shot soley on the new iPhones, but I don’t feel a threat to my job security….yet. The quality needed for professional work is not there at the moment. Rather than a threat, I think this will be an asset to the industry to inspire and find those in our populations that should be behind a high-end camera making beautiful work. 

What do you think? Can you see mobile devices such as the iPhone 6 Plus being used more in the future of filmmaking?

Check out more films from Uncage The Soul Productions on their Vimeo.