Guerrilla Filmmaker
Go manual with video controls
The best camera, they say, is the one you have in your hand. With this in mind, Sotcha has created the Guerrilla Filmmaker app, and it’s actually rather good. It unlocks manual options for the otherwise automatic features of your iPhone’s video mode – such as the camera’s focus – though it’s not the first app to do that. But that’s actually just the beginning.
Yes, manually controlling the focus with a slider to create rackfocus-style shots is both easy to do and extremely satisfying, but it’s the programmable keyframe feature that makes this app so interesting and potentially useful.
All the manual features can be programmed to change their values at pre-designated intervals. That means if you have a tracking shot and want to pull focus between two focal planes you can program your focus shift, hit record and let the app worry about hitting the marks.
For filmmakers, this is a truly amazing feature and one that many professional cameramen would wish their pro cameras had built in. Which, come to think of it, they really should do.
This programmable function is pretty easy to use and, like the rest of the interface, is reasonably well designed and intuitive. Menus are dragged in and out of view with swipes and, when expanded, the manual controls appear on-screen as simple sliders.
That said, it’s not all perfect. There’s no manual aperture control on the iPhone, so depth of field is locked; and, though the icons look good, it would be a nice touch to have more of a real-world interface that would be instantly recognisable to a video professional or DSLR owner. Alun Pughe
Guerrilla Filmmaker represents superb value for money and real potential for iPhone-loving indie filmmakers.