Smart phone Filmmaking

A couple of days ago I filmed my first production on a Smart phone. I shot a short comedy sketch which had three characters. Two were on smart phones and were oblivious to the world around them whilst the other character walks in to have a conversation with them but ends up having an argument instead because the other two characters feel that their smart phones are more important than the conversation.

Filming with a smart phone was more problematic than I had envisaged. My first problem was with the camera control app Open Camera. This app is designed to give you more controls to your mobile phone camera such as white balance, manual exposure and focus. The app gave me many other features to supposedly control the camera but the controls didn’t exactly work. The main issue was that I was unable to lock in an exposure setting, although it did have a lock in setting feature. My next issue was the inability to change the shutter speed which hindered the editing process. I tried to solve the issue by downloading different apps and using different phones, but no other app or phone had shutter speed change. So I simply had to make do with what I had.

Other than these issues, the rest of filming went well. To provide variety, I was able to use interesting camera angles and shots with the lens I bought to attach to the phone. The actors were great and we wrapped the scene in a morning.

However, when it came to editing the film together, I came across a problem I couldn’t understand: the footage didn’t sync with the audio. During production, I had recorded audio separately on a Tascam and field audio mixer. The reason for this was that when I researched the subject it said that mics plugged into smart phones can sometimes come loose which means the smart phone mic automatically records the audio and is very low quality. But, when trying to sync the audio to the footage, the sync kept going in and out. This was very odd as it only applied to certain takes of the footage. Despite the problem, there were a few takes of shots that were in sync, so I was able to create the scene I wanted.