Why Danny Boyle shot ‘28 Years Later' with iPhones
In Brief
Director Danny Boyle famously shot his post-apocalyptic classic '28 Days Later' on Canon digital cameras, making it easier for him to capture eerie scenes of an abandoned London, and giving the movie's fast-moving zombies a terrifying immediacy.
To make his decades-later sequel '28 Years Later' (which opened this weekend), Boyle turned to a different piece of consumer tech — the iPhone. Boyle told Wired that by using a rig that could hold 20 iPhone Pro Max cameras, the filmmaking team created 'basically a poor man's bullet time,' capturing the brutal action scenes from a variety of angles.
Even when he wasn't using the rig, Boyle (who once directed a biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs) said the iPhone was the movie's 'principal camera,' albeit after disabling settings like automatic focus and adding special accessories.
'Filming with iPhones allowed us to move without huge amounts of equipment,' Boyle said, adding that the team was 'able to move quickly and lightly to areas of the countryside that we wanted to retain their lack of human imprint.'
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Determined to bring the same you are there verisimilitude to race cars that they did to fighter jets in 'Top Gun: Maverick,' Kosinski, cinematographer Claudio Miranda, and superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer have gone to extraordinary lengths to capture the essence of F1 — lengths that include turning Brad Pitt and co-star Damson Idris into legit Grand Prix drivers, attaching hi-def micro-cameras to the frames of their vehicles as the actors whipped around the world's most famous tracks, and filming at the actual events that are depicted in the movie. Not only was the fictional APXGP team granted its own garage right between Scuderia Ferrari and Mercedes, but the pre-race party Idris' character attends before the tour's Las Vegas pitstop is even hosted by the real DJ Tiësto! 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