In just 20 minutes, we are going to show you how to master mobile filmmaking. This video will be for those of you wanting to create YouTube videos, social media influencers, people wanting to use their phones to film better travel videos as a hobby, or even people wanting to start a film business and are just wanting to get started with what they have. The point is, whenever this clock hits zero, you will have full confidence and have mastered your smartphone. We're going to be talking about how to properly set up your phone, how to get the correct exposure, all the settings you need to know, things to avoid with your smartphone, and even some of the gear we would recommend, like lenses and gimbals and things like that. Also, at the end you'll watch us get the correct exposure in real world examples from interior shots to exterior shots. This will truly be the ultimate guide to master smartphone filmmaking. About a year ago, we made a video called Master Your Camera in 20 minutes talking about how to properly run your dSLR or mirrorless camera. And so many of you guys said how much you appreciated that video and how much it helped you out. And some of you said in that one single video you learned more than you did at film school. So with smartphones becoming more and more popular and with people starting to use them more, we thought we would do the exact same thing. But with mobile filmmaking, because it's no secret how popular smartphones have become. Steven Soderbergh, who is an Academy Award winning director, actually has made multiple films on an iPhone, and one of them made about 15 million at the box office. Yes, a movie made $15 million that was filmed and what you have in your pocket. And not just that, but an iPhone seven. Okay, last year we filmed an entire wedding on just an iPhone 13, and no filmmaker that we showed it to could tell a difference. This proves nothing more than just how powerful your smartphone can really be. All you have to do is know how to properly run your camera, which we're going to show you in this video. Now, of course, we're going to be talking all about the basics of mobile filmmaking, but if you want to learn even more, you can check out our full academy at tomorrow's filmmakers.com. With over 1200 training videos and over 120 hours of content on every single filmmaking subject taught by leading professionals in the film industry. All right, enough. Introduction. Start the clock now. Whenever you switch your phone to video mode and start filming, it might look kind of crappy. And that's because you are not using a manual camera app. Do not use the native camera app on your phone. You have no control of the camera settings and everything is set to auto. This will result in the exposure changing when you look at something darker or brighter and immediately look amateur and just look like a cell phone. No professional video changes, exposure or color while recording. You want to be able to set your exposure and lock it. Now, some of the newer phones have little more settings and features built in like pro video settings, but believe me, it will be much better if you have a third party camera app that is 100% devoted to giving you full controls of your camera and no longer shooting in auto mode, we would recommend Filmic Pro, DJI Beast Cam, or the Moment Pro camera app. Now, Filmic Pro is definitely the best app on the market in terms of features and functions, but unfortunately, they recently switched from a one time payment of 15 bucks to a subscription model of $40 a year or $3 a week. I honestly have no idea why they did that, and a lot of people are actually jumping ship because of that. If that's something you'd still be interested in at that price, go for it. But we prefer the Moment Pro camera app, which is only $6 to download forever. But again, it doesn't matter what phone or camera app you're using, it's the settings inside that are universal that we're going to be talking about. So get a camera app and let's move on. The four major elements of getting the correct exposure with your phone and properly using your smartphone are frame rate, ISO, shutter speed, and white balance. You'd also have something called aperture, but you only need to worry about that if you're shooting with a dSLR that has a lens, so we don't care about that one. If you have an iPhone, Android, Google Pixel, or even a burner phone, whatever it is, these four elements are used in all phones. Some training videos I've seen only focus on one of these settings, and never give you the bigger picture of how all of these things work together. So we're going to be going through every single one, starting with frame Rate. And if you've seen our other video called Master Your Camera in 20 minutes, which is all about the mirrorless camera and dSLR, as you'll be familiar with a lot of what we're talking about in this section, the term frame rate refers to how many frames are in one second of your video. If we shoot something at 30 frames per second, then inside one second of footage there will be 30 frames taken to equal one second. Now, the reason we need to know this is because you should shoot in certain frame rates and avoid other frame rates. Your smartphone will automatically be set to shooting at 30 frames per second, but the. Industry standard frame rate is 24 frames per second. This is the most cinematic and is what they use in Hollywood films today. It will give you the most natural looking motion that we're all used to seeing in the theater. If you want to shoot in slow motion, you need to shoot in 60 frames per second or higher. But you don't just want to play it back at normal speed, or everything will look like a soap opera, because soap operas are shot at 60 frames per second. To get slow motion, you would take that 60 frames per second clip and slow down your footage and it would be buttery smooth. This is how you achieve slow motion, by shooting clips at a higher frame rate to allow more information whenever you slow down. The good thing is, it's very simple. Just remember normal clips 24 frames per second. Slow motion 60 to 120 frames per second. So whenever you open your phone app, it might be different depending on your app. But locate the frame rate option, which in our case is located at the top of our phone, and change that to 24 frames per second. The next two things that we're going to focus on in getting the correct exposure is ISO and shutter speed. These are the two settings that you need to know, and you need to set these before you ever press record. Now, you might be tempted to just click on what you want to expose for, because some apps will give you the ability to do that, and it will automatically change these two settings to expose for what you clicked on. The problem is, these two settings affect certain things about your image, and so we need to set these manually. The first setting and probably the easiest to understand is just your ISO. This stands for International Standards Organization. And I have absolutely no idea why they called it that. It makes no sense because all it is is a way to make your image brighter or darker digitally, without adding any lights to your scene. If we take our ISO right here and move it up and down, you can see the image getting brighter or darker depending on the ISO numbers. Pretty simple to understand, but there is one downside to ISO that we need to know about, and that is that ISO will produce noise and grain in your image. So when you boost your ISO, it starts to look like TV static on your image. Now if you're taking a picture, it doesn't look that bad because the noise isn't moving. It looks like an old Polaroid image, but in video the noise will actually move and genuinely look like TV static, which will ruin your image. And this isn't just with iPhones. This even happens to expensive cameras too. Every camera is different and gets noisier at different levels. All phones are also different, but I probably wouldn't go above 800 ISO unless I absolutely had to. So the biggest thing to understand is that ISO is useful and should be used to adjust your exposure, but you want to try and keep it as low as possible. That is the number one rule. Next is your shutter speed. Now shutter speed can be a little confusing, so I'm going to try to explain it in the best way I possibly can. Your shutter speed on your camera is how long your image is exposed to the world. So let's take a typical dSLR camera. The sensor inside the camera is what sees the world and captures the image onto the SD card, but there's a shutter in front of the sensor that keeps it from seeing anything, just like the eyelid of your camera. When the shutter opens, it allows the sensor to see the world, and then whenever it closes, that's one picture taken, and you've probably heard the sound of a shutter opening and closing a thousand times with photographers. But depending on how fast the shutter will move up and down will then determine your image being brighter or darker. So if your shutter opens up for 10s and just soaks in all the light and then closes, that's going to be a lot brighter than if your shutter opens for a fraction of a second and sees the world for just a moment. Well, with video, it's the exact same thing, except it's all done digitally. There's no physical shutter moving, so you're basically affecting how long each of those 24 frames are exposed to the world. If you have a really slow shutter speed with video, it's going to act the same way and allow a lot of light into the camera versus if we have a really fast shutter speed, it's not going to allow as much light into the camera. So a slower shutter speed is a lower number and brighter image, a faster shutter speed is a higher number with a darker image. But just like with ISO, shutter speed doesn't only change exposure, it also affects something else and that is your motion blur. So since there is a shutter opening and closing, affecting the motion blur makes sense. For example, if we're taking a picture of a car and the shutter opens up, the car drives by and then it closes. The picture is going to be a car driving from one end of the frame to the other, resulting in a giant smear across the image. But if the shutter opens and closes at a fraction of a second, it's going to capture the car right in its place. Again, it's the same way with video. If we're looking at a ceiling fan and have a very slow shutter speed. As you can see, there's kind of a lot of motion blur. And if we look at the same ceiling fan with a very fast shutter speed, it's almost looks jittery and hyper realistic, and there's no motion blur. And if. We paused both of these frames. You can really see what one frame looks like versus the other. On the left, you can see that there is a blur happening in all. 24 of those frames look like this. But on the right, with a high shutter speed. All 24 of those frames look like this with no motion blur. The cool thing is, you can use this to your advantage to communicate a message to the audience. So if we turn our shutter speed really, really low, you're going to start to get an image that looks like this. It's very dreamlike and looks really strange and is warping everywhere, and it's completely unusable if you're just filming something normal like an interview. But if you want to use this for like a dream sequence, or maybe someone's about to pass out and they can't see properly, all you have to do is turn down your shutter speed. The opposite is also true. If you crank up your shutter speed to an extremely high level, you will have no motion blur, and you will have something that many people refer to as the Saving Private Ryan effect. If you notice in a lot of war movies, they have this hyper realistic, jittery look, and that's because they've simply cranked up their shutter speed whenever they're just talking. Before the battle starts, everything looks normal, but right when the battle starts, everything is super jittery and there's no motion blur. They don't add any special filters or expensive lenses. All they do is simply crank up their shutter speed, which you can do inside your smartphone. Now, before you start messing with your shutter speed, there is a rule of thumb to get the most natural looking motion blur with whatever frame rate you're shooting in, and that is, you want your shutter speed to be double the frame rate. This will look the most natural, so shutter speeds will go up and down in increments of ten, sometimes five, but most of the time ten, 20, 30, 40, 50 all the way up to crazy high numbers. So if you're shooting at 24 frames per second, doubling that would be 48. Some cameras can do 48, but since most of them just go up in increments of ten, you just want to pick the closest one, which would be 50. So if you're shooting at 24 frames per second to get the most natural looking motion blur, you would want your shutter speed to be at 48. If you're shooting at 60 frames per second, you would want your shutter speed to be at 120, which would be doubling your frame rate. So ISO affects the exposure, but can cause noise and grain if it's too high, and shutter speed affects the exposure as well, but will also affect your motion blur. So understanding both of these things and what they affect will really determine how you get the correct exposure and what settings you change with your iPhone. And like I said at the beginning, aperture is also something you need to know about, but only if you're using mirrorless cameras because it affects the lens itself, but it does not apply if you're using a smartphone. So now that we know the two settings you need to know to be aware of, there is another setting that will make your image look like a cell phone if you don't change it. And that is your white balance. White balance basically tells your phone what is the color white. If this setting is off, all other colors in your shot will lean more orange or blue. I bet you've noticed that sometimes when you press record, your image looks more orange than it did last time, and that's because of your white balance setting is off or it's on auto. If you're dealing with orange light, you need to tell your camera that you're dealing with orange light so it can compensate and make your whites look pure white on a smartphone. Your white balance will automatically be set for you unless you change it. And that can be really dangerous because it will change colors when you look at different things. This shot here was set to auto white balance, and the iPhone was automatically making the image look really warm and orange. When I realized it was set to auto, I set the white balance properly and it looks a thousand times better and accurate to how that actual shot looked when we were there. Now, on a dSLR, you can create custom white balances by using a gray card and holding it up and taking pictures of it and all that kind of stuff. But unfortunately, smartphones don't have that kind of option. I would suggest using a custom Kelvin temperature. The lower the number, the bluer the image and the higher the number, the warmer. So if you're dealing with a warm light, you set your white balance to compensate for the warm light. And then you have perfect colors. If you want to, you could just kind of eyeball it and move the bar up and down until the image looks good. But if you know the Kelvin temperature of what you're shooting in, then you simply set it to that number. These right here are all the Kelvin temperatures you need to know about in all situations. But in reality, there's only really two that you're going to be using most of the time. And that is 3200 for inside and 5600 for outside. Now listen, you can get really, really in-depth with white balance, but I don't want this to be confusing for you because it doesn't have to be. Simply set the temperature to what environment you are in. Or again, just move it until it looks right. The point is to control your white balance and lock it. You don't want the color of your image to be fluctuating during your shoot, simple as that. And there's one more thing I want to talk about before we go out in the field and show you how to get the correct exposure. And that is something that everyone should get. And that is an Indy filter. Now, this isn't necessary to start filming, but it. Really does help. It's essentially sunglasses for your camera in some really, really bright situations. If you need to turn down the exposure, you bring your ISO all the way down, but you don't want to crank up your shutter speed to 3000, because then you'll get that kind of jittery look. So the Indy filter allows you to put those sunglasses on front of your iPhone so you can have the shutter speed, double the frame rate, and still have the correct exposure. All right. We have a lot more to talk about. And I want to share some things with you that took my iPhone footage to an entirely new level, like certain settings to have lenses, all that kind of stuff. But since we just talked about all of these settings, you need to know to get the correct exposure. I'm going to take you guys with me outside. I'm going to show you in real time how to get the correct exposure. And then we will come back and I will share some more stuff with you. So in this first scenario, even though the image might look properly exposed, we notice that all of our settings are way off. So we start by first bringing our ISO down from 600 to as low as it can go. And we notice the image is really dark because our shutter speed is still crazy high. So let's bring that down to double our frame rate, which would be 48. And again, if your app only allows you to bring it down to like 50, that's perfectly fine. Next we would change our white balance and lock it. And right now we're in sort of an indoor outdoor shady area. So we're just going to move our white balance around until we find something that looks the best, which in this case is right around 4600 Kelvin. And we now have the proper exposure and proper white balance without changing any of the settings. We move to an outdoor sunny area and you can see that the image is really bright. Now, unfortunately, the ISO is already as low as it will go and the shutter speed is double the frame rate. So in this situation, there's really only two things that we can do. One is to use that ND filter that we talked about. If we add an indie filter, which again is sunglasses to your phone, we can bring down the exposure of our image, but still keeping the ISO as low as possible and the shutter speed double the frame rate. But if you don't have an indie filter, the only thing that you can really do in this situation is to crank up the shutter speed until you have the correct exposure, which yes, might give the image a little bit of that jittery look. But if this is the situation you're in, it's pretty much the only way to get the correct exposure at this point. And personally, there have been many times where I have not had an Indy filter and I just have to crank up the shutter speed. Next we will change the white balance and being outside in the sun, we will set our white balance to around 5400 to 5600 Kelvin, which is going to give us the most natural looking color. And now we have the proper exposure with the correct settings. And finally, without changing any settings, we come inside in. The image is really dark. Now in this situation I would probably add some lights to this scene, but if you're unable to do that, the first thing we see is that the shutter speed is really high. So we're going to make that double the frame rate. Now the image is still a little bit too dark. So we're going to bump up the ISO a little bit to about 500. But being careful not to go over 800, which will introduce a lot of noise and grain in our image. And lastly we change the white balance. Now it's currently set to 5600 Kelvin for outside. But since we're inside we're going to set it between 3200 and 3600 Kelvin, giving us the most natural looking colors. So as you guys can see, you have to juggle all of these settings to get the correct exposure and color. The ISO, the shutter speed and the white balance all need to be changed for each situation that you're in to get the most cinematic image out of your smartphone. All right. Great. You guys know how to get the correct exposure with your iPhone, but there are still a few more things that you need to know about. And we're running out of time. So I'm trying to go really quick. But there are some things you need to know about to take your iPhone footage to the next level. First are the settings. The first thing we would do is, of course, change your shooting quality to 4K to get the highest quality. Also, in your settings, change your bitrate to as high as it will allow you to go, and if your bitrate is set to standard or low, just go ahead and set that to high. Next, turn off the internal stabilizer. Many times, especially in older phones, the internal stabilizer just looks like bad warp stabilizer and made the image look like it was just warping and terrible. Also, if you're using a gimbal, the internal stabilizer will actually fight against that and make your image start to warp even if it's on a gimbal. The best thing to do is just completely turn that off and rely on your gimbal for stabilization. And finally, we would suggest shooting in a flat picture profile. So most apps will give you the option of shooting in a standard profile, a flat profile and a log profile, with the image being super flat. Now, since most smartphones only shoot in eight bit, there's only so much you can do with the colors in your camera. And with the test we have done, we have found that the standard adds too much contrast, while the log is a little too flat and starts to lose detail, so we would recommend shooting in the middle with a flat picture profile. This will. Give you plenty of room to work with in post, while also not being too flat that you start to lose information. All right, before you guys go. There are a couple more things I really want to talk about to improve the quality of your projects when you're using a smartphone, and if you implement these few tips, you will immediately see drastic improvements. One is to only use your main lens. Now, most smartphones today have a few cameras built into them like this one. We've got an ultra wide lens, a standard lens, and then a telephoto lens. Now, unfortunately, even though the ultra wide lens might look cool, they both should be avoided. Phone companies prioritize the standard lens that you're going to be using the most, and that means the highest quality glass and the highest quality lens is going to be that standard lens, which is about 26mm. So if there's a shot that you need to show something really wide, move the phone farther away and don't use your ultra wide lens. Which leads me to probably the best thing you can do to improve your phone quality. And that is third party gear or more importantly, lenses. Now, is buying gear for an iPhone necessary? No. You can start using it exactly like it is, but it does greatly improve the overall quality. The biggest piece of gear that we would recommend would definitely be lenses. And we aren't talking cheap clip on lenses that you can buy on Amazon for 10 or 15 bucks. But professional lenses made specifically for your phone, the number one brand we would recommend would be moment lenses. And they aren't sponsoring this video or anything, but we have just found their lenses to be some of the best for smartphones. They're somewhat expensive at a little over 100 bucks apiece. But what these allow you to do is to get different focal lengths, but still use that highest quality standard lens on your phone. They have macro lenses which allow you to get super close and detailed, and even anamorphic lenses. We probably wouldn't use some of the crazy lenses too often, but the fact that you can get this image from an iPhone is amazing. We have all the links to these in the description below, and a link to our cinematic smartphone kit that has all the third party gear that we would recommend. Next would be smooth movements. Nothing screams iPhone video more than someone holding their cell phone and clicking a record. It immediately looks like some mom filming their kids at a park. If you want to immediately improve the quality of your smartphone footage, buy a gimbal. Are we out of time? Okay, we're out of time. Okay. We're out of time. The clock is at zero, but I just have a few more minutes, I promise. Just a couple more minutes, and then you'll still be an expert, but more like 23 minutes. Master your iPhone, like, 23 minutes, and then we'll continue. You can always purchase a really expensive one, like a DJI RS2 or three, but you can also buy cheap gimbals that are specifically for a phone like the DJI Osmo. That works great. The point is, if you want your footage to immediately improve, don't hold your cell phone when you hold a mirrorless camera. It looks more artistic, but when you hold a cell phone, it looks like you're holding a cell phone because you got all these little hand jitters. Trust me. Stabilize your footage. And finally, the biggest thing is simply to know your phone's limitations and then just avoid those situations. It's as simple as that. If we know what the iPhone sucks at, don't film it. For example, iPhones and all cell phones really are terrible in low light, which means don't film in low light. If it's a bright, sunny day and you're filming outside. People might not even be able to tell it was shot on a smartphone. But if you shoot at night time, everyone's like, oh yeah, that's that's terrible. That looks awful. Remember at the beginning I talked about Steven Soderbergh filming a feature film on an iPhone? It was critically praised and made 15 million at the box office. Well, there's an entire scene that takes place at night time. And if you look at the behind the scenes, they shot it during the day and then tinted the color blue to look like it was nighttime. Even an Oscar winning director knows that smart phones suck in low light, so avoid those situations with your smartphone. Also, avoid blown out highlights. An expensive camera can see details in the dark area and bright areas at the same time, but unfortunately, cell phones don't have good dynamic range, and you kind of have to choose what you want to expose for the shadows or the highlights. When you point at a direction and see a window that is just pure white and super bright, it automatically looks amateur and looks like you're filming with a cell phone. Simply avoid blown out highlights in areas with a lot of contrast, and if you do this, the quality will skyrocket. You see, by understanding the limitations of your phone, you're able to then create higher quality shots by avoiding places that phone sensors just can't handle. So there you have it, guys. In just 20 minutes, I showed you everything you really need to know in order to start using your smartphone properly. You can always press record and start filming, but if you follow these steps, you will take what looks like home video that you filmed on vacation and turn it into a cinematic video that even professional filmmakers. Won't be able to tell was filmed on a smartphone. Now again, the tips and tricks I share with you are just the beginning. If you'd like to learn more about shooting with a smartphone inside our full academy, we have over 100 plus episode mobile filmmaking cinema course on everything you need to know to get cinematic footage with your cell phone. You can learn more about them inside our full course at tomorrow's filmmakers.com. We have over 1200 training videos and over 120 hours of content on every single aspect of filmmaking, with over 30,000 students from all around the world. Our award winning film course is your one stop to learn all the skills that you need. If you'd like to get into the business side with weddings, commercials, real estate, we talk all about that. Or if you'd like to go more into the production side with directing, storyboarding, acting, we teach all of that as well. And the best part is, right now we are running an insane deal of only $97 a lifetime membership to our award winning $800 online film course is only 97 bucks, and that includes our in-depth mobile filmmaking course. So if you're just getting into filmmaking or if you'd like to learn more, Tomorrow's Filmmakers is the place for you because it will show you how to go from a beginner all the way to an expert. So click the link below to learn more. So guys, I hope this video has really helped you guys out. And now you have full confidence in taking your smartphone, going out in the field and even doing like we did in film an entire wedding. And all we did was use all of these points, apply it to our cell phone, and we made a video that even seasoned filmmakers didn't know was filmed with a cell phone. So hope that you guys enjoyed this video! Head on over to tomorrow's filmmakers.com to learn more.