So many people get hung up on the gear they want to use for their film. While it may be true that your camera gear can make a good film better, the gear is not the most important factor when making a film. Today, high quality cameras are smaller and cheaper than ever. Plus, with websites like YouTube and Vimeo, it’s a lot easier to get your film seen. Since the development of these sites, the world has come to know and love all sorts of videos with varying degrees of image quality.
But quality is a relative term, isn’t it? How do you define what makes a “good” video? Is it the story? The actors? The way it looks? Some of the videos we have grown to know in the past few years have been shot with professional gear and some have been shot on point and shoot cameras or even cell phones. The one thing they all have in common is that they are entertaining. In other words, a successful video isn’t successful because of the gear used to produce it as long as it’s entertaining. It’s not so much about the actual gear itself but how you use it.
Framed is a perfect example of a gorgeous film shot with a minimal amount of gear. French filmmaker, Maël Sevestre, made this film in just a few days but you would never guess that from watching it. It’s a simple story of a man and his camera. The film was shot with only a tripod, a slider and an iPhone 4S attached to the slider with a couple of clamps. It wasn’t the most elegant setup in the world but that didn’t matter. All the elements of a great short film are still there.
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“This is exactly what I’ve been talking about. A beautifully shot story all shot with an iPhone 4S and it looks amazing,” says Zacuto Product Designer and Director, Steve Weiss. “It’s not about the gear, guys. It’s about the story, the talent and the people behind the camera. If you don’t listen to me, a guy that makes his living selling equipment for high end camera gear, who will you listen to?”
As a young filmmaker from Annecy, France, Sevestre was looking for a new project. He has worked on quite a few large projects in the past and is used to working with a big production team but this time around he was looking for something new on a smaller scale.
“I just wanted to do a small short, like a 48-hour film project,” says Sevestre. “So I called one of my comedian friends and asked him if he was available for the weekend to shoot a small “not yet written story.” Some friends and I started brainstorming about what kind of story we wanted to tell and then one of them showed us the brand new iPhone 4S. We liked the idea of making a movie only using the phone instead of the 5D Mark II. So we did. I had heard that the iPhone 4S had a new optic (a real one), so I figured why not be the first to do a short movie using only this camera?”
Sevestre and his friends wrote the story that night and 24 hours later, they were in his childhood village shooting Framed.
“We wanted to tell a story about an old camera that allows you to see his past owner,” says Sevestre. “We saw a link between a newer camera like the iPhone, which is a product of consummation, and an old camera, one you keep throughout your entire life. I really wanted to get the color of autumn and tell a poetic story in this season.”
Maël Sevestre did an excellent job achieving just that. The colors are amazing and the story is very sweet. There were a few problems with flickering colors and stabilization, but any filmmaker will tell you that you never have a shoot without running into a few problems here and there. Sevestre worked around these problems and at the end of the day, the team had all of their shots. Editing only took another day and by that night, Framed was up on Vimeo. It was textbook independent filmmaking at its best.
Take a look a Framed below and see what we’re talking about!!
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