David Harter
Writer/Director/Editor/Actor
I am the founder of DC-area film society Oddball Cinema, which specializes in showing strange, surreal, and lesser-seen films...sort of going beyond cult films. I also write screenplays and will be making my first short film in 2020.
Kubrick was right. I recently went back and tried to re-read The Shining after many years. It has not aged well, and it is not the book that mesmerized me when I was 13.
Rewatching Good Time now to get ready for this.
Definitely on my list to see before year's end. This has been a great year for new films from up-and-coming directors like Robert Eggers, Peter Strickland, Ari Aster, and now the Safdie brothers.
Agreed. iPhones have a good look to them, but it's also a very recognizable look if you've watched enough films shot on them. The film above definitely has the iPhone look.
I've got an LG V30 that has been pretty good for shooting most things. Of course, I also tend to stray outside of manual settings, so I've gotten a bit more out of it, though it's been a learning process. The auto settings tend to veer in the same direction as the iPhone's default settings, more or less.
This looks great, but I will say that it definitely has the iPhone default settings "look" to it. I attended a smartphone film festival a few months ago, and after watching film after film for several hours, most of which were filmed on iPhones, I noticed that the iPhone gives a definite "look" to its films: light sources that wash the area around them, artificially high contrast between different items within the frame, and an exaggerated color scheme.
It's a great look for most purposes, I'll say that. However, any filmmaker who aspires to use a smartphone to make films, be warned: If you use only the default settings, your film will look VERY dated within just a few years. It's a bit of a learning curve if you're just starting out, but it's worth learning how to use your smartphone's manual settings, particularly your f-stop settings, ISO, color temperature, and white balance (I've found that auto focus is less important).
Though I sort of understand why so many writers would take that approach, I find it kind of annoying that the story of the Grady twins was what they focused on. It's low-hanging fruit that would never be as good on screen as you imagine it from the source material. They did the same thing with 'Solo' (i.e. go through all the fan favorite stories), and the result was underwhelming.