Bollywood Film Shot on iPhone Proves Your Camera isn’t Holding You Back
Apple appears to be getting more confident with the imaging capability of its mobile devices as it just published a 30-minute long, epic Bollywood film shot entirely on iPhone.
Shot entirely on iPhone 14 Pro, “Fursat” is described by Apple as a Bollywood-style musical celebrating the power of love.
“The film depicts the story of how love can be found and cherished when appreciating the present, rather than dwelling in the past or worrying about the future,” the company says. “‘Fursat’ has all the ingredients of popular cinema, including songs and choreographed dances, packaged together on a scale never seen before for a non-commercial film.”
Directed by award-winning Bollywood director Vishal Bhardwaj, and supported by a cast and crew of widely celebrated Bollywood personalities, “Fursat” is a gorgeous scenes and choreography show that these days, the only thing holding back photographers and filmmakers is imagination and drive — no one can blame their camera anymore.
“As a device, iPhone is taking away the limitations we had when we were growing up,” Bhardwaj says.
“We didn’t have the luxury of cinematic quality video which iPhone is providing for every budding filmmaker today. I’ve never had this scale of production in my films ever before. And, this can tell you about what iPhone can achieve.”
Apple is getting more ambitious with the filming situations it is putting its iPhone cameras into. While the company has produced films using only its smartphone in the past — such as Park Chan-wook’s “Life is But a Dream” — the productions are getting far more complex.
Last month, it released another 17-minute short film shot entirely on iPhone called “Through the Five Passes” by award-winning director and screenwriter Peng Fe. That film involved some complicated sets, but “Fursat” not only nearly doubles the run time, but ups the ante on the scene-to-scene complexity.
“I didn’t know how much iPhone could handle, but the way it did was just fantastic,” the film’s director of photography Swapnil Sonawane says.
Objectively, the quality of the footage shown in Fursat is quickly catching up — or even surpassing — the quality of dedicated commercially available cameras from not even a decade ago.
Photographers and filmmakers often like to blame their lack of high-quality content on their inability to afford the best equipment, but Apple is regularly proving that — at least when it comes to the capture device — nothing more complex than the camera that spends most of its time in a pocket is necessary.
Image credits: Apple
