Made entirely on iPhone 4S.

Song by fresh polish band Wilhelm Jerusalem. Starring Izabela Łaban and Tomek Pawłowski.

Directing, camera and editing by me (Łukasz Krysiewicz @ secondgate.pl/). Thanks for the help from the whole band and Anna Łapińska.

A short explanation. I’m a complete amateur with creating videos, not even mentioning music videos. We started knowing that it won’t be as good as it deserves and we all agreed that we want to try. We had no budget, no equipment and no experience.

We created a simple script where we wanted to show him going in her direction. We didn’t wanted to show if he succeed or maybe even leave a thought that she might be just in his imagination. So I found several beautiful locations in north-west Poland (maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=201956357401485666922.0004dc22ad35d54a910c0&msa=0) where we shoot one day with Iza and one day with Tomek. Just two short days. Obviously not that much, especially when you are not sure what are you doing. 😉

A word about the equipment. No one in the crew had a camera, so we shot everything with iPhone 4S using a cheap tripod and Glif (studioneat.com/products/glif). The iPhone has a really great recording capabilities, but obviously is far from perfect. I used FiLMiC Pro 2 (filmicpro.com/). The app is great, but shooting on the iPhone is difficult as you can’t really see the imperfections in focus and other small things on Retina display. The screen makes everything looking better that it appears on 72 DPI desktop. I suggest bringing a laptop with standard screen and watching every scene after they were shot so you can fix the mistakes.

The other hard thing is to shoot movement from hand. I thought we do several takes on those scenes and then I’ll use some software stabilizer. The effects is not as good as I hoped. And this is probably the thing I am not happy with the most. Few weeks after shooting I thought about better solution to stabilizing movement. We could use a rope and hang the iPhone on it. Then we could pull the phone hanging in desired direction. It would stabilize the view quite a bit. Damn pity I didn’t thought about this before! For the “slider” views we used a LEGO car: facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10200352433566876&set=a.1734785342879.90934.1635931260&type=3&theater I will mod this to use a small electric engine to make if move with constant speed.

If there is something I can say about cutting the scenes, it would be that now I think doing this right in movies is one of the hardest jobs ever. I didn’t appreciate editor work before. I will now.

The last part was the color grading and general processing. I had almost no previous experience with After Effects but I am working with Photoshop on daily basis. I am completely amazed how easily you can add a sky, remove a string that was holding the mirror or remove those nasty moving cars reflecting in the window. The grading might be a little off in the scenes, but I found it hard to match the colors when they were shot completely different. I did my best though. I think the newest version of FiLMiC Pro gain a special profile for shooting with grading in mind. That would be super handy.

Nevertheless, I am proud that I managed to learn a little about After Effects and many video editing aspects in a week. That was intense, but I feel I did quite good for a guy who just learned what grading means.

Who to thank except the whole team? Vimeo community for tutorials about grading! Young Replicant for the inspiration (I know it cannot be seen here) 😉 and great videos. Adobe for making all those fantastic things possible and with ease (although one of the crash took two days of my work!). And Apple for putting such a fine camera in a phone.

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