OLDBOY Director Park Chan-wook Uses iPhone 4 To Shoot Film!

Tech Movie Oldboy Park Chan-wook iPhone about 14 years agoby

Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Thirst) introduced his new film on Monday, a 30-minute short called Paranmanjang (Korean for “Ups and Downs”). What is special aobut this film is that it was shot entirely using the iPhone 4.

When I say entirely I mean entirely:

“From hunting for a film location, shooting auditions, to doing a documentary on the filming process, everything was shot with the iPhone 4. We went through all the same film-making processes except that the camera was small.”

This short film teamed him with his younger brother Park Chan-kyong, a media artist and KT Corp. KT, South Korea's excluisve provider of iPhones, paid for a portion of the $130,000 in production costs.

Pyo Hyun-myung, president of KT’s mobile business group had this to say about the use of iPhones for the film,“the product of the state-of-the-art technology meets art.”

The short tells a "fantastical tale that begins with a middle-aged man fishing one afternoon and then, hours later at night, catches the body of a woman. The panicked man tries to undo the intertwined fishing line, but he gets more and more entangled. He faints, then wakes up to find himself in the white clothes that the woman was wearing. The movie’s point of view then shifts to the woman and it becomes a tale of life and death from a traditional Korean point of view.

The phone lends itself to the look and the feel of the film. The screen is coarse which worked well for filming the night scenes which deal have a life-and-death theme. This is not the first time that the iPhone 4 has been used to create film. In October, KT sponsored a film festival with 12 short movies made with the phone.

Unfortunately the film will only be shown at nine cinemas nationwide later this month. The majority of audiences will have to wait until it hits the web. I do not have an iPhone, nor have I used one so I don't have first hand filming with it. Do you have an iPhone 4? We would love to see some of your filmmaking skills shot with the phone.