iPhone 13’s new Cinematic mode brings focus pulling to the people
Apple may not put cinematographers out of work with its latest iPhone feature but it could help you become the next Hitchcock.
It’s just possible that the next Oscar-winning movie director, or cinematographer, might make their blockbuster film on an iPhone. And if you think that sounds far-fetched, consider this: leading filmmakers are already making movies with smartphones.
In 2018 the Academy Award winning director Steven Soderberg shot the feature film Unsane, starring Claire Foy, entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus. The 2015 Sundance Film Festival favourite Tangerine was shot entirely on an iPhone. And the Oscar-winning 2012 documentary Searching For Sugar Man was partially shot on an iPhone. And there have been countless independent feature and short films also made with little more than some imagination and a smartphone.
Apple, however, has made a great leap forward in its serious filmmaking capabilities with the new iPhone 13 and the introduction of what the company calls Cinematic mode. In this mode an iPhone can record video of people and objects with shallow depth of field, as you can with still images in Portrait mode. The big difference, though, is that Cinematic mode also features automatic focus changes, where the focus shifts from one person or object to another in the same shot.
In cinematic terms it’s called rack focus, or focus pulling. It’s where one subject in a scene (in either the foreground or background) is in focus and gradually the focus changes to another subject in the scene. The technique allows the cinematographer to put a dramatic emphasis on one subject and then change that emphasis to another. It’s a complicated process that requires a great deal of precision and skill, not to mention highly technical – and expensive – lenses and equipment.
But as you might expect with Apple, the process has been reduced to just a swipe of the finger. Open the camera app, swipe to the left and you’re in Cinematic mode and ready to make your next movie masterpiece. The focus can be changed during and after your capture (in the Photos app or iMovie on iOS, and soon in Final Cut Pro and iMovie for macOS). Cinematic mode can also anticipate when a prominent new subject is about to enter the frame and bring them into focus when they do.
In developing the new video feature, Apple’s design team spent a lot of time studying the history of cinema. And what they soon learned was that storytelling in cinema was fundamentally tied to cinematography. “We loved going back to Hitchcock, and the movie Psycho, for example, and other classics,” says Johnnie Manzari, an Apple designer with the company’s human interface team. “Part of the process was pulling the films we loved apart to find out what we loved about them. And in doing that we saw certain trends emerge. It was obvious that focus and focus changes were fundamental storytelling tools. They’re so pervasive, and we ended up finding examples not just from drama but from comedy – really across the entire spectrum of film.”
Before Apple could develop the technique, it needed to understand how rack focus worked with traditional movie cameras and lenses, so the company worked with cinematographers whose work they admired to observe how they do it. “And we very quickly developed a real appreciation for how difficult their job was. And we felt this was the kind of challenge that Apple tackles best – taking something difficult and that’s conventionally hard to learn and turning it into something that’s just automatic and simple.”
And just as Apple’s Portrait mode innovation, which allows users to create still images with a shallow depth of field, didn’t put professional photographers out of work, Apple doesn’t think Cinematic mode will make professional filmmakers and their tools redundant either. The feature is primarily for the everyday user and those who aspire to be the next Hitchcock.
“I don’t think the people we worked with on this, the cinematographers, are necessarily scared of being replaced by an iPhone. I would say it was actually the opposite,” says Manzari. And to prove that point the company put the finished product in the hands of some leading filmmakers prior to its release.
For the brand’s big reveal of its newest line-up of iPhones and to unveil Cinematic mode, it enlisted the help of two-time Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow to put the new iPhone function through its paces. Bigelow, in turn, drew on the expertise of Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser, who worked with Bigelow on the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty and who was the cinematographer on the soon to be released Dune.
“It thought it was a good challenge [to make a film with the iPhone], Bigelow said in Apple’s Keynote presentation. “And with so much accessibility I think all pretension tends to disappear and so it makes the set and the filming process much less apprehensive.”
Greig Fraser says: “There were no limitations to what I could do with this particular camera, whereas normally everybody gets so precious about the camera and the lens because it’s so expensive or so fragile. I believe with the advent of the iPhone and with the addition of Cinematic mode we are going to very soon see filmmakers make films in a different way, which is exciting.
Cinematic mode is available on iPhone 13, 13 Mini, Pro and Pro Max
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