Apple releases Indian-made 'Shot on iPhone' short movie

National Award winning director Vishal Bhardwaj created the short movie Fursat entirely using the Apple iPhone 14 Pro

During the 2019 Cricket World Cup, Apple created a wonderful ad Shot on iPhone XS, capturing India's love for the Cricket game. Even the fun 'iPhone 12' ad 'Fumble' featured a soundtrack of 'The Conference' by musician Nitin Sawhney.

Now, Apple in collaboration with National Award-winning Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj has released an entertaining 30-minute short movie 'Fursat', entirely shot on iPhone 14 Pro.

The visuals of the fast-paced time-traveling musical come off as a contemporary Bollywood romantic movie and are really good; most people will find it a bit hard to believe, it was recorded using just a smartphone. But, those who have used iPhones for over the last four or five years, would not be that much surprised.

In the movie-making, two key features of the iPhone 14 Pro come to the fore. One, the 'Cinematic mode' with automatic focus shift between multiple subjects in the scene and 'Action mode' offers the best jerk/shaky compensation to ensure the video is stable.

The first song of the movie with Ishaan running through the market was recorded with the iPhone 14 Pro by the Director of Photography, Swapnil Sonawane, running in parallel with no gimbal. And, yet the scene came off smoothly.

Fursat movie is shot entirely with Apple iPhone 14. Credit: Special Arrangement

During the interaction with the media, Vishal Bharadwaj told that the aforementioned scene usually would have required a big team of experts, expensive camera hardware, and supporting equipment. Bhardwaj was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the video.

"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," said Vishal Bharadwaj.

Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max. Credit; DH Photo/KVN Rohit

On asked if he would do another movie using an Apple iPhone, Bharadwaj jokingly said that he has many scripts and some won't get potential producers excited to invest in them and if required, he would probably do one in the future.

Must read | Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max review: Refined to near-perfection

The Fursat story revolves around the Nishant (Ishaan Khatter), an archaeologist working on a relic time-traveling machine 'Doordarshak'. On the day of engagement with the love of his life Diya (Wamiqa Gabbi), he accidentally turns it on and gets teleported to a desert, and eventually, the ceremony gets canceled and the emotionally hurt Diya, tries to move on with her life. Do they really get back together, check out the movie available on YouTube.

Shot on iPhone: Vishal Bharadwaj's short movie 'Fursat' short on YouTube:

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