Last week, Apple released a Fursat, a musical love story that is shot entirely on the iPhone 14 Pro. This 30-minute film is a Bollywood-style musical celebrating the power of love and is helmed by award-winning Bollywood director, Vishal Bhardwaj. It has Ishaan and Wamiqa Gabbi in the lead roles.
Supported by a cast and crew of celebrated Bollywood personalities—the film has all the ingredients of popular cinema, including songs and choreographed dances, which are integral to Bollywood, packaged together on a scale never seen before for a non-commercial film, according to Apple.
This makes use of the iPhone 14 Pro’s Action mode that offers a steady, smooth video even if you’re capturing in the middle of the action. It provides even more stabilisation in situations where the person capturing the video is moving around a lot, like running.
It also uses Cinematic mode that enables beautiful depth-of-field effect and automatic focus changes to video in a simple and intuitive way for a cinema-style moments offering a more immersive storytelling. This now works in 4K and has better semantic rendering with better results on hair and glasses. For more creative control, the focus can be changed both during and after capture. Cinematic mode also records in Dolby Vision HDR.
Regarding Fursat, the Director, Vishal Bhardwaj, said:
A traditional film camera comes with 10 people, 3 attendants and 10 boxes of lenses… you can’t move around. You can’t be quick. iPhone liberated me in that sense. Action mode was the biggest surprise for me. In Fursat, we’ve covered a lot of things in action mode. If you see the raw footage, the visual is so jarring and destabilised. On Action mode, it’s so smooth. You have to see it to believe it.
I’ve never had this kind of scale in my films ever before. And this can tell you about the scale iPhone can achieve. As a device, it’s taking you out of the limitations which we had when we were growing up. We didn’t have the luxury which iPhone is providing every budding filmmaker today.
Director Of Photography, Swapnil Sonawane, said:
I didn’t know how much iPhone could handle, but the way it did was just fantastic. I think action mode is the most amazing update. For it to be held in your hand and run with all your might looking at the actor, one can get extremely steady shots, without an external gimbal.
The way Cinematic mode shifts focus is the way the focus puller would, it’s an emotional shift focus, which is what was absolutely beautiful about it.
Cast and crew profiles.