Make movies with your iPhone – explained!
Make plans, gear up and shoot
Shooting movies on your iPhone can be fun and exciting, and video clips are more likely to catch the eye on a social media feed than still images. As it’s ever-present, you can whip out your iPhone and press the Action button (on iPhone 15 Pro) to instantly open the Camera app. If you then press and hold the Action button you’ll start recording video. This enables you to capture clips of spontaneous events such as your child’s first steps.
However, the best movies should start with a bit of planning ahead (which professional movie makers refer to as the pre-production stage). For example, if you’re going to shoot a wedding then you might want to consider packing some helpful accessories into a kit bag, such as an iPhone handheld cage. Cages have cold shoe mounts – so that you can clip accessories on – such as a JOBY Beamo LED light to help you capture more detail in gloomy interiors, or a mini directional shotgun mic to capture clearer audio during a noisy party. Check out our top kit recommendations in this spread’s Gear Up! section.
Shoot to edit
After the pre-production stage you move onto your movie’s recording (or production) stage. Instead of recording the action as one long boring shot with the camera panning wildly back and forth (or ‘hose-piping’), break it up into shorter clips that you can edit together to tell a story.
For example, if shooting action (such as a friend performing a parkour move), film a static wide shot of the action first. Then change your camera angle and shot size and ask your friend to repeat the same action. You can then cut from the wide shot to the close-up in iMovie (in the post-production editing stage), and it will look like the action was shot ‘live’ by two cameras, creating a more professional-looking sequence.
Gear up!
To improve the production values of your footage consider splashing out on these third-party gadgets.
1 The NEEWER iPhone cage (uk. neewer.com) lets you slide your iPhone into a robust aluminium cage. The side handles give you a safer grip on your phone and enable you to perform a range of slick camera moves, from tilts and pans to 180º rotations – perfect for filming a child performing a somersault on a trampoline, for example!
Your iPhone’s built-in mic can do a great job of capturing voices from subjects in close proximity, but the
sound quality rapidly drops off as your subject gets more distant, plus ambient noise such as traffic can easily make voices inaudible. By purchasing a wireless mic kit like the Saramonic Blink 500 B2+ (saramonicuk.com) you can improve your movie’s audio production values. Simply clip the Blink 500 B2+’s small transmitter mic onto your subject’s clothing (or attach it via a magnet) and then broadcast their sound wirelessly to a receiver plugged into your iPhone (from up to 150 metres away!). The transmitters have an effective noise reduction feature too. The Blink 500 B2+ kit ships with two receivers – one that’s compatible with older iPhone Lightning ports and a second USB-C version that will slot into an iPhone 15 model.
If you are a self-shooting vlogger and want to walk and talk while the iPhone follows your every move then consider buying a gimbal. Your iPhone is quite capable of shooting gimbal-smooth footage thanks to its Optical Image Stabilisation feature, but gimbals do more than simply keeping the iPhone’s movement looking stable.
The DJI Osmo Mobile 6 (dji.com) uses a free app to make the gimbalmounted iPhone pan and tilt to keep your face in shot as you walk and talk. This is like having your own camera operator on location! You can also plug a Blink 500 B2+ receiver into your iPhone while it is mounted on the DJI Osmo Mobile 6 so your clip will feature camera moves and you’ll sound great!
Hitting the beach with your family offers plenty of movie opportunities, and while an iPhone 15 is waterresistant for up to 30 minutes, you’ll be safer popping it inside a waterproof casing like the JOBY SeaPal (joby. com). If you drop your ‘naked’ iPhone in the ocean it will be a challenge to locate it, but inside the SeaPal it’ll be much easier to rescue!