Like many photographers, musicians and gadget nerds before me, I suffer from a terrible case of GAS.
No, not that gas — Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Part meme, part psychological impulse, GAS is a compulsion to buy shiny new things, rooted partially in a desire to improve creatively without doing much work. And since I’ve been testing Apple’s new iPhone 15 Pro Max — which the company has described as an unusually capable tool for filmmakers — I couldn’t help but wonder how far this shiny new smartphone could help me stretch my (amateurish) video skills.
So, we took on a challenge: Reproduce part of Olivia Rodrigo’s music video for the song “Get Him Back!” which was shot with an iPhone 15 Pro. The goal? To see how well a newly obtained creative tool like a shiny smartphone can cover for a person’s lack of experience and expertise.
Here’s how we did it and what we learned.
The constraints
5 hours of shoot time. That may feel like overkill to re-create 22 seconds of footage. But we had to factor in time to set up, figure out where/how to shoot in the studio space we rented, and actually record the 15 shots and transitions that make up this part of the video.
$120 gear budget. I used this to buy some dinky lights on Amazon — which were all but useless on a bright shoot day — and a “cage” with bolt-on handles I strapped the iPhone into.
This budget, by the way, also includes software used to edit the footage. I have a little bit of experience using Adobe Premiere, but because its $20 monthly fee would have put me over budget, I had to use a three-month free trial of Apple’s Final Cut Pro instead. And since the Apple ad that highlights the music video clearly depicts the crew using the iPhone’s default Camera app, that’s what I used too.
A bare-bones crew. Platforms like YouTube were built on the backs of friends making silly videos together, so I roped in two Washington Post video producers — one of whom would mostly be capturing what happened behind-the-scenes — and Help Desk reporter Tatum Hunter to fill Rodrigo’s shoes for the day.
The results
Click on the video above to see for yourself how the process unfolded and what we learned.
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