"No Love Like Yours," the latest video from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, is an evocative, dreamy vision of death and rebirth, set against the unique backdrop of New Orleans. It was also shot entirely on an iPhone 6S Plus. Utilizing a cobbled-together camera rig and an app called Filmic Pro the same one used to shoot last years festival favorite Tangerine actress-turned-director Olivia Wilde and her team turned Apples smartphone into a 4K filmmaking machine, proving once again that the most ubiquitous piece of technology in our daily lives is also a creative tool with shockingly impressive potential.
But from the very beginning, Wilde was pitching the video with a very specific twist: theyd shoot it on an iPhone. "I had offered a couple of years ago to shoot a video for Edward Sharpe on an iPhone, because I thought we dont need a lot of money to do this. This was the iPhone 4," she says. "Once the iPhone became the 6S and had the ability to shoot on 4K, it was a whole other ballgame. Not something that was a fallback plan or a sacrifice. It became something that was actually an exciting kind of tool."
Thats not to say everyone was totally on board with the idea in particular, her cinematographer Reed Morano, whos worked on HBO's Vinyl and the 2014 dark comedy The Skeleton Twins. "When [Olivia] said that she was shooting it on the iPhone, I was like, Ah, Jesus. Too bad Im going to have to say yes to this, because Ill do anything for that woman," Morano tells me over the phone. "Even though people think of me as a young cinematographer, I am known in the cinematography world as always being a film purist, and not being as receptive to digital taking over. So it was a big deal for me to be all, Yeah, lets shoot it on an iPhone!" But Morano came to see the proposition as a challenge worth taking on: theyd shoot it on the smartphone, but it had to look good. And that required going far beyond just pulling out a phone and pressing record.
For "No Love Like Yours," Morano used what amounted to a box with a depth-of-field adapter, letting her shoot with the same kind of shallow depth of field often associated with 35mm or comparable digital cameras. A series of adapters then allowed her to swap in different camera lenses of her choice (she favored a set of Nikon lenses that she normally uses for still photography). "Its a little bit of a Frankenstein rig," Morano admits, "but it worked." Shooting in a widescreen aspect ratio at 24 frames per second helped complete the cinematic look.
While operating the handheld set-up wasnt as convenient as shooting with a traditional camera rig "I didnt love that aspect of it," Morano says, "but it didnt matter because the images that were coming out of it were shocking to me" the smaller size did prove less awkward for the actors and performers themselves. "A lot of the people that were in that video were not actors," Marano says, "and I think the fact that we were [shooting] with this tiny little thing felt a lot less intimidating to them, and they were really able to let loose and be free."
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/10/11175784/edward-sharpe-and-the-magnetic-zeros-iphone-music-video
