‘28 Years Later’ was shot on iPhone, using up to 20 models at once

Hollywood’s summer blockbuster season is in full swing, and one big new movie premiering next month—28 Years Later—

will be especially unique: it was shot entirely on iPhone, including with a rig that held 20 iPhones at once.

Special camera rigs held up to 20 iPhones at a time

Danny Boyle’s 2002 hit zombie thriller, 28 Days Later, is getting a sequel this summer.

The new film, 28 Years Later, was shot entirely using the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Well, more accurately it was shot using a lot of iPhone 15 Pro Max models.

In a new article at IGN by Scott Collura, fresh details on the production and its challenges have been shared.

For example, there were three special iPhone rigs used for certain sequences:

“One for eight cameras, which can be carried very easily by one person, one for 10 cameras, and one for 20,” explains the director of the iPhone rigs. “I never say this, but there is an incredible shot in the second half [of the film] where we use the 20-rig camera, and you’ll know it when you see it. … It’s quite graphic but it’s a wonderful shot that uses that technique, and in a startling way that kind of kicks you into a new world rather than thinking you’ve seen it before.”

 

Boyle equates the 20-camera rig to “basically a poor man’s bullet time.” It allows flexibility for the filmmakers in terms of light and ease of use on location shoots, and it can be attached to cranes or a camera dolly or built into a location even.

 

“Wherever, it gives you 180 degrees of vision of an action, and in the editing you can select any choice from it, either a conventional one-camera perspective or make your way instantly around reality, time-slicing the subject, jumping forward or backward for emphasis,” he says. “As it’s a horror movie, we use it for the violent scenes to emphasise their impact.”

Danny Boyle mentions in the article that using the iPhone was not just some random challenge, it was a very strategic decision.

As Collura puts it, summarizing Boyle’s reasoning, “if an apocalypse did happen there would be low-fi recordings of the horrors laying around everywhere. Taking that idea 28 years later, the iPhone was of course the now-ubiquitous version of 2002’s camcorder.”

28 Years Later arrives in theaters on June 20, and you can watch the trailer here.

Source