Days 6-7: Shoot It on a Phone — Lenses, ISO, Aperture, the 180-Degree Shutter, ND Filters, Aspect Ratio, Log vs Default, Filmic Pro, and Five Books

Apple shoots ads on iPhones; his thesis film cost $200 (a $2,000 work-study tuition credit for filing paperwork funded it) while classmates spent $20,000 on 35 mm stock for twenty minutes - and the audience preferred his. 'Budget is not stopping you... the lack of those things just forces you to do great work.' Sound matters more than image; a little lighting effort lets 'a low grade camera compete with the higher grade ones.' What follows - photographic concepts and one app - is framed as timeless.

Lenses: 25 mm wide makes faces 'unnatural', 100 mm compresses and flatters, the background tree grows 'giant'; 240 mm pushes the ears forward. ISO = sensitivity/film speed; disposables were ISO 800; 'bring ISO down as low as possible first' - a ~102,400 frame is noise, ISO 100 is clean. Aperture: 'the higher the number, the more closed'; f1.2 wide open to f22; a 35 mm prime opens to f2.8, a 24-240 zoom only f3.5-6.3 (his fastest long zoom cost $120,000); lower f-number = shallower focus (about six inches) vs f22-f40 deep focus - Citizen Kane's crew allegedly blew the power grid to close down enough. Shutter: at 24 fps use 1/48 (the 180-degree rule; his camera's 1/50 is 'close enough'); 1/24 smears, 1/500 is 'the protagonist is on coke' - Gladiator's fights; slower shutter for a creamy date scene. Rule: 'faster shutter = less motion blur and less light; slower = more of both.'

With ISO locked low and shutter at 1/48, opening to f1.4 for shallow focus over-exposes: 'there's no image.' A variable ND filter - 'a dark piece of glass; as you spin it, it darkens' - removes light without touching the three settings, so the aperture becomes a pure creative choice: he blurs the power lines behind the subject. On a phone the same trick is a ~$5 clip-on ND used with Filmic Pro.

Theatrical ratios 1.85:1 (comedy/drama - fits a face) and 2.35:1 (epic/action - Star Wars keeps the world in the frame even in close-up); every screen is 16:9 and most films get cropped to it; Zack Snyder's Justice League used IMAX-native 4:3 for chosen scenes as a comic-panel choice. Pick the ratio before filming. Gamma: default camera processing pushes data to the ends of the 0-1023 range - looks good immediately, little latitude; log/raw keeps it in the middle, flat, with detail in shadows and highlights and full malleability (temperature, exposure push/pull, an 'Antarctica' look) at the cost of grading time - shown on RED raw. Decide for the whole film after tests.

Lens choice (tele/wide/selfie). Settings: resolution maxed (16:9 or 1:1 crops for genre), quality 'good'; frame rate 24 - for slow motion pick the highest, 240 fps only at 1080p on the iPhone X, and 240 plays back slow natively without post. Audio: external mic through the adapter. Stabilisation off gains resolution but shows shake - off on a tripod, on handheld. Manual panel: rack focus, zoom (digital only - avoid), ISO down to 15 (tap to lock, turns red), exposure box tap-to-lock. Clip-on ND ~$5. App ~$15, log add-on ~$15. Audio chain: Lightning-to-3.5 mm adapter (~$10) -> TRRS cable -> any mic; a $15 Amazon wired lav within six feet beats the built-in; Rode ~$200-300 (what the course was recorded on); Sennheiser $600-800 is 'extreme overkill.' For deeper gear training: 14 Day Filmmaker.

Reading order: Aristotle's Poetics (short; half lost with the Library of Alexandria; the foundation), David Mamet's On Directing Film (story principles applied to directing), Directing Actors (Dan still writes action verbs from it when prepping scenes), Walter Murch's In the Blink of an Eye (editing, 'one of the greatest editors'), Hitchcock/Truffaut (a favourite). Links carry a 4% affiliate commission that funds the course.