28 Years Later honors digital heritage with a 20-camera iPhone rig

20 iPhones: large for filming fearfulness movies and protecting your modesty.

Upcoming fearfulness threequel 28 Years Later is acold from the archetypal Hollywood movie to beryllium shot with the assistance of an iPhone, but it mightiness conscionable beryllium the archetypal changeable connected 20 iPhones. That’s however galore phones manager Danny Boyle had mounted connected a peculiar rig for prime shots successful the movie, which releases June 20th.

For Boyle, shooting connected iPhones is much than conscionable a gimmick. He returns to the bid aft directing the 2002 archetypal 28 Days Later, which was changeable connected a integer video camcorder, a meta motion to the information that this was however location videos were changeable astatine the time. He and returning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle took that arsenic an “influence” successful choosing to sprout partially connected a phone, the camcorder’s closest modern equivalent. 

It was first reported past year that Boyle had changeable 28 Years Later connected an iPhone 15 Pro Max, but according to IGN the movie really uses a premix of regular cameras, drones, and iPhones, including 3 peculiar rigs designed to clasp eight, 10, oregon 20 iPhones astatine once.

“There is an unthinkable changeable successful the 2nd fractional [of the film] wherever we usage the 20-rig camera, and you’ll cognize it erstwhile you spot it,” Boyle told IGN. “It’s rather graphic but it’s a fantastic changeable that uses that technique, and successful a startling mode that benignant of kicks you into a caller satellite alternatively than reasoning you’ve seen it before.”

Boyle calls the 20-phone rig “basically a mediocre man’s slug time,” explaining that it allowed the unit to sprout immoderate of the film’s much convulsive scenes successful caller ways. “It gives you 180 degrees of imaginativeness of an action, and successful the editing you tin prime immoderate prime from it, either a accepted one-camera position oregon marque your mode instantly astir reality, time-slicing the subject, jumping guardant oregon backward for emphasis.”

It’s not the film’s lone antithetic cinematographic choice. It was besides changeable successful an particularly wide 2.76:1 facet ratio, the equivalent of 70mm film, to support viewers guessing astir wherever the film’s infected could popular up: “If you’re connected a widescreen format, they could beryllium anywhere… you person to support scanning, looking astir for them.”