Well-known South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook has shot his latest film entirely on the iPhone 4. The 30-minute short “Paranmanjang,” Korean for “ups and downs,” is fantasy-horror film about a middle-age man who catches a woman’s body while fishing in the middle of the night.
Despite some of the limitations of the iPhone camera, Park said that the device worked well for the filmmaking. The main difference, he said, was the size and portability of the “camera.” Park told The Guardian that “the new technology creates strange effects because it is new and because it is a medium the audience is used to.”
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The iPhone was used for all aspects of the filming process – hunting for a location, shooting auditions, making a documentary about the filming process – in addition to making the film itself. Initial reviews from today’s screening said the cinematography was “quite good, except for a little shakiness in the beginning.”
The film was made in conjunction with Park’s younger brother, Park Chan-kyong and KT Corp, South Korea’s exclusive iPhone distributor. KT paid for a portion of the film’s $130,000 production costs.
Park won the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 with “Oldboy” and the Jury Prize in 2009 for “Thirst.”
Those who doubt that the iPhone 4 can be a suitable film camera should remember some of the controversy and concern surrounding the move to digital filmmaking – and away from “film” – in the first place. (Of course, some of that concern came from the fact that one of the first high-profile movies to go digital was Star Wars Episode II, but I daresay cinematography wasn’t the problem there.)
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