American Cinematographer - August 2014 - 20

Production Slate

I

Shooting a Feature on an iPhone
By Ricky Fosheim

Peter (Jonas Fisch) is a freshly minted movie star. He has it all:
wealth, fame and a beautiful expecting wife (J'aime Spezzano).
When the couple's two best friends join them at their new mountain
mansion for Peter's birthday, envy, secrets and paranoia play out
against a barren winter landscape. As the two couples grow increasingly antagonistic, they turn to alcohol and drugs to bury the past,
and when an old acquaintance shows up unexpectedly, Peter must
scramble to protect his new life. The harder he fights to hold it all
together, though, the faster he descends into a cavernous mental
abyss. As the night grows late, Peter struggles to decipher reality
from a twisting rabbit hole of truth and illusion.
The two writers of And Uneasy Lies the Mind, Jonas Fisch and
Dillon Tucker, are an abstract painter and poet, respectively. When
they approached me about producing, directing and shooting the
project, I knew right away it was going to be an unconventional
movie. The whole story unfolds through the fragmented and traumatized memories of a man who has been robbed and violently hit
over the head. The film's visuals needed to reflect this point of view,
which is far from crisp and clean.
My first thought was to shoot on 16mm film. Without the
budget for that, though, I set out on a quest to replicate a 16mm
aesthetic with newer digital-camera technology. From the start, I
welcomed grain, dirt, flares and any other techniques that would
help me create a dirty, fragmented and organic look.
I was heavily influenced by Janusz Kaminski's work on Saving
20

August 2014

Private Ryan [AC Aug. '98], in which he used in-camera tricks and
other technological means to essentially break down the 35mm
image. The disorienting images that resulted had an inherent beauty
in the way they captured the feel of battle. I was also influenced by
the camerawork of Harmony Korine's Gummo, Thomas Vinterberg's
The Celebration, Richard Linklater's Tape and Roman Polanski's
Repulsion - I've always been a big fan of the bold images in those
films.
My research led me to a community of filmmakers who were
shooting on iPhone cameras with 35mm lens adapters. Inspired by
their work, I purchased an iPhone 5 and a Turtleback SLR Jacket lens
adapter, then went to Division Camera in Hollywood to conduct
comparison tests against the Red Epic MX and Canon 5D Mark III.
The results blew my mind: The iPhone footage was raw, dirty,
vignetted and unlike anything I'd seen before. I immediately fell in
love with the look, and I decided to fully embrace these unconventional limitations as powerful storytelling tools.
The Turtleback adapter incorporates a focusing glass with a
patterned texture, almost like a fingerprint. Hair, dirt and oil from my
hands would always get stuck on the glass, adding further texture
and imperfections that I completely welcomed. In fact, I elected not
to clean or replace any of the dirty parts, and at times I even added
dust or dirt.
Another interesting result of the focusing screen is a vignette
around the entire image. You can control this vignette by adjusting
the iris; the more you close down, the heavier the vignette gets.
Even at a mid-range f-stop of 5.6, the edges become extremely dark
and full of aberrations, and begin to deteriorate in beautiful and

American Cinematographer

All images courtesy of the filmmakers.

Peter (Jonas
Fisch) endures a
mental collapse
in the feature
And Uneasy Lies
the Mind, which
director/
cinematographer
Ricky Fosheim
shot entirely on
an iPhone 5.



American Cinematographer - August 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2014

Contents
American Cinematographer - August 2014 - Cover1
American Cinematographer - August 2014 - Cover2
American Cinematographer - August 2014 - 1
American Cinematographer - August 2014 - 2
American Cinematographer - August 2014 - Contents
American Cinematographer - August 2014 - 4
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