Tag: smartphone

• November 12, 2015

  What I Learned Making a Short Film on an iPhone

  

  When I started making short films more than 15 years ago, a decent, mid-range consumer video camera was about the size of a brick and recorded either to miniDV tape or mini DVD, which was good for 60 minutes of recording. Tapes got chewed up during playback, DVDs got scratched, and in the general the process of making a film was tedious and technical.

  In the time before YouTube, once you had finished your film — provided that you hadn’t lost footage to the magnetic tape gods — you had to connect to a tape deck to transfer your finished film to another format that could be easily shared. Somewhere in a box, there’s a stack of old VHS tapes with handwritten labels documenting my early filmmaking efforts.

  I bought my first digital camcorder when I was 18. It was a hot rod red Canon FS200. It fit in the palm of one hand and recorded video in 720p to an SD card. To me, it was magic — like the leap forward from horse and buggy to the automobile. Suddenly, my media was reusable and my footage could be easily edited and shared from a computer. It was revolutionary. It fundamentally changed the way I made movies and allowed for my film studio, Obscure Studios, to really take off in my early college years.

  Then, a few weeks ago, there was another revolution. Stephanie and I made a short film for Halloween entitled “The Closet.” Instead of breaking out my trusty Canon, I decided to take a risk. We filmed the entire thing with an iPhone 6. Not only were we able to film in full HD, an astounding 1080p, but it acted like a real camera. In low light conditions and noisy rooms, it outperformed my old camcorder handily.

  What’s most amazing to me isn’t just the fact that I can now carry a high quality video camera around in my pocket, but the way technology has allowed the technical difficulties of filmmaking to slowly take a backseat to the creative difficulties. When filmmakers don’t have to spend time and money on expensive cameras to achieve good looking film, they are freed up to tell a great story. No longer are amateur filmmakers in a different class than the professionals. Now, we all have the power to tell beautiful stories without needing a $20,000 camera to do it.

  The easy availability of inexpensive video equipment means that anyone with a story to tell can tell it. And that’s amazing.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and filmmaker in Tacoma, WA. You can find him on Twitter at @jonnyeberle.
• May 13, 2014

  Seeing The World Through a Smaller Screen

  

  This weekend, my girlfriend and I settled into our balcony seats at the historic Neptune Theatre in Seattle’s University District for a concert. As the blue and purple houselights dimmed and the band took the stage, a hundred smartphones were borne aloft to capture the moment. It was easy to excuse the first time. The theatre has character — from its stained glass windows to its ring of Poseidon heads with glowing eyes — and the lighting of the show was, in a word, awesome. But after the third, fourth and fifth time that people around me snapped a photo for Instagram or Facebook, I started to get annoyed. Some people were recording videos of entire songs; one girl was even texting through the entire opening act. Several times during the performance, my view of the stage was blocked by a dozen mobile devices craning for the best photo or video.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a digital native, not a Luddite. My phone is nearly always within reach — I myself snapped the above picture before the show. But there comes a time when you need to put the camera phone down and be present. Especially when you’re paying to hear live music, why would you want to experience the whole thing through your four-inch phone screen? You are missing so much.

  Mobile devices are great. I love being connected to the world through my phone. But there are times when I don’t want access to the whole world at my fingertips. There are times when I want to be isolated in a brief, shimmering pocket of time and space. I want to be immersed in the present. Performances are one of those places where maybe you shouldn’t have your device out. If you like the song you’re recording so much, why not buy the album? You can’t get caught up in the waves of emotion when you’re busy tweeting a photo or texting a friend. I’ve been guilty of being distracted and operating under the illusion that I was effectively multitasking. It turns out that paying attention to your phone doesn’t leave a lot of attention left for the world around you.

  Even if you don’t care about blocking someone else’s view of the stage or blinding everyone within ten feet with the glare of your screen, do it for yourself. Turn the phone off and put it away for an hour or two. You will be able to remember this night without a hundred filtered photos to prove you were there. You may notice the subtlety of the music, the artistry of the lights and the message of the lyrics without a barrier or plastic, glass and computer chips in front of your face. Facebook will still be there when it’s all over, but the story you have to tell will be that much richer, even without the help of your iPhone.

  

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer of many words in Tacoma, WA. You can follow him on Twitter, debate him in the comments or simply shut down your computer and read a book for the rest of the day. The choice is yours.
• November 19, 2012

  A Day Without an iPhone

  

  When I first realized that I’d left my phone at home, I panicked. I was cut-off from the world; isolated from my social network, friends and loved ones. For several hours, I would be unreachable by phone call or text message. I started to feel anxious, but within a few minutes, the rational side of my brain woke up. What was I doing?

  Like so many of us, I’m a little addicted to my technology. I like being connected. I like talking to friends around the world, reading the news as it unfolds and snapping shots to tweet and instagram to my followers across several social media platforms. But today, my dependency scared me. I had to ask myself: Can I function a day without my smartphone?

  I’m part of the generation that’s old enough to remember a time before the Internet invaded our homes, but young enough to have been indoctrinated in the promise of the Information Age. I remember getting my first email account in the third or fourth grade and my amazement that those beeps and chirps could transmit text and photos across thousands of miles of telephone lines.

  From there, I tumbled down that slippery slope from email and word processing to message boards to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter as my Internet devices got smaller, faster and more powerful. In the blink of a decade, my personal computing power increased about 2,930 percent.* That’s mindblowing.

  But sometimes, I worry that I’m too plugged in. I do have less face-to-face interactions. I talk less on the phone and I notice things around me less than I did before my eyes and fingers were glued to the touch screen. Can I go a day without my phone, a few hours? I thought it couldn’t be that hard.

  At first it was. It’s part of my routine; at times almost an extension of my body. But after an hour or two, I was able to focus on my work without much distraction. I have a laptop at work and my job keeps me logged into Facebook and Twitter for much of the day, so I didn’t miss much (just five text messages and a handful of other notifications). Still, not feeling the constant buzz of the phone was downright relaxing.

  Maybe I need to forget my phone at home more often.

  

  — 30 —

  I’m a tech junkie, Applephile and all-around nerdy guy, which means I really like Twitter. Follow at your own peril.

  *(Some people may want to know how I got this number. Our family’s early-90s desktop behemoth had a 33 MHz processor and my phone has processor that clocks in around 1 GHz. So, around 2,900 percent faster. Multiply that by 2.4 to see how badly my laptop tounces the old Compaq Presario. Even more mindblowingly, my hard drive space has increased 500,000 percent.)