7 Essential Filmmaking Apps
The great thing about filming with your phone is you've got access not only to a great camera, but to a lot of support applications as well! Today we're going to look at a couple of my favorites.
I decided to try something a little bit different this week and step outside, do the whole project on my iPhone, and enjoy the beautiful weather. For reference, this is going to be filmed on an iPhone 15 Pro Max using the 1x camera and filmed in ProRes using the stock application.
Blackmagic Camera App
We've had Filmic Pro for years, we've had Cinema P3 for years, and they're both great apps, but the Blackmagic camera application is a phenomenal addition to the world of filmmaking on an iPhone. The fact that it is free is a huge plus, but it also gives you a lot of the manual controls you want while keeping things simple enough that it won't overwhelm you. For anyone who's familiar with filming with a Blackmagic camera, it feels right at home. It's the same UI, the same feel as the cameras that I've been using for years for a lot of my professional projects, but it's all within your phone.
One of my favorite features is that I can display a LUT live while I'm filming, so I can find a LUT that I like for the phone that works for the look I'm going for. I use the Buttery LUTs a lot; they've got a great look to them, and I love that I can just load that up and film all day long, seeing what it's going to look like when I go to bring it into post. When I'm editing, I can just drop that LUT on it, give it the look I want, and then dial in a little bit more since I'm filming in LOG. Plus, the fact that you can control your frame rates and go to 4K 60 without needing an external hard drive is a huge plus.
Sun Seeker
Next up, anytime you go to film in a location, whether you're inside or outside, it's always helpful to know where the sun is. The sun is going to impact how you light things. I love to use an application called Sun Seeker that helps you literally see where the sun's going to be in the sky during the day. It's going to tell you exactly where it will be at any point in the day. If you put it in 3D mode, you can literally just move your camera around and see exactly where in the sky, using the AR functionality, it will be at 1 p.m., 2 p.m., 3 p.m., whatever time you need. Plus, if you know you're going to be filming at a location maybe 3 months from now or 6 months from now, you can change the date on it, and it will tell you where the sun will be on that date.
Lumi
Next up is an application that actually goes hand in hand with Sun Seeker called Lumi. The great thing about this app is it's very simple but it literally just tells you when golden hour is, when blue hour is, and all the different lighting conditions that are great for photography and video, all in one application. What it does is see your location and tells you, "Hey, sunset's at this time, golden hour is from this time to this time, blue hour is from this time to this time, first light is from this time to this time," and so on. The way I use this application is by putting a widget on my home screen. When I look at my home screen, I can see when the next golden hour is, when the next blue hour is, first light, all those types of things. It's a quick way to glance at my phone and see that information, but if I want to dig in a little bit deeper, the app is there for me to use.
Notion
Next up isn't exactly a filmmaking application, but it's my favorite application these days to keep everything organized. I love Notion. Notion is a note-taking application on steroids. You can obviously just take general notes, but you can drop in any form of media, links to places, and organize everything and interlink all the documents to really get everything where you need it to be. It's what I use to organize a lot of the projects for Smartphone Storytellers, for a lot of my freelance projects, and any stories I'm telling. I'm using this application to keep all of my details straight. It's one of those applications that's going to overwhelm you a little bit at first when you start using it, just because there's so much you can do, but the more you play around with it, the more you see just how you can really customize it. I haven't even touched the surface of what you're able to do on this application, but it is a phenomenal place to keep everything organized.
Freeform
Next up is Freeform. This application actually works best on an iPad, I found. I can access it on my phone and my Mac, but in terms of actually utilizing the application, I usually will use this on my iPad. The way I use it is literally as a notepad in meetings. If I'm on a phone call with someone where I'm trying to hear their story, it's a quick way to open up a whiteboard, grab the pencil, and just start taking notes. As I get more notes, I don't have to make a new page; I just scroll a little bit. It's not quite a never-ending canvas, but the amount of information you can put on a single canvas means you're not having to really think about new pages and doing all these things. The application essentially gets out of the way for you to take your notes.
Slow Fast Slow
Next up is an application called Slow Fast Slow, which literally helps you change the speed of your footage from slower to faster or from slow to fast to slow, whatever you want to do. You can speed ramp it as you want. You can take footage that's been filmed in really any frame rate and slow it down if you want, speed it up if you want. The application is completely free. Now, is this as good as filming in 60 frames a second and then conforming that footage in post to 24 frames a second? No, because you still don't have the extra information, but Slow Fast Slow does a pretty good job of making up for that, so it's not as bad as when you sometimes will change the speed of stuff in post. It's a great option and it's a free application.
Files / iCloud Drive
Finally, here's something that's more of a tool that I use as opposed to an application, but it's through an application. When I film on my phone, if I'm not using an external hard drive like I am today, I have to get that footage off my phone somehow. Yes, I can connect my phone to my computer and transfer it over, but sometimes that's not the fastest way to do it. I could AirDrop it, and that's getting a little bit better than it used to be, but still, that's a little bit clunky. I found the main way that I now transfer footage over is after I'm filming, I'll jump into my Photos app, select all the clips I filmed, and then I'm going to send that to the Files application and put it on my iCloud Drive. What the phone will do is move it to that folder wherever I put it in the Files application, and then it's going to automatically upload those to iCloud. Then I can just walk over to my computer, open that folder on my iCloud, and download the clips or it should automatically sync them to the desktop. It's not as convenient as using an external hard drive, but I found this to be a very convenient tool. If I'm out in the field shooting something and I want to make sure the footage is ready when I get back to my computer, I can just do that real quick in the field. It takes 30 seconds for me, and then the phone's going to do everything else in the background to move it over.
There are tons of applications that I use when I'm filming, but these are just a few of the ones that came to mind that I wanted to make sure I shared with you guys. My question is, what's your favorite application that you use on your phone that helps you in your filmmaking? Drop it in the comments and we'll talk about it there. But as always, it's not about the gear; it's about the story.
