Director Danny Boyle famously shot his post-apocalyptic classic “28 Days Later” on Canon digital cameras, making it easier for him to capture eerie scenes of an abandoned London, and giving the movie’s fast-moving zombies a terrifying immediacy.
To make his decades-later sequel “28 Years Later” (which opened this weekend), Boyle turned to a different piece of consumer tech — the iPhone. Boyle told Wired that by using a rig that could hold 20 iPhone Pro Max cameras, the filmmaking team created “basically a poor man’s bullet time,” capturing the brutal action scenes from a variety of angles.
Even when he wasn’t using the rig, Boyle (who once directed a biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs) said the iPhone was the movie’s “principal camera,” albeit after disabling settings like automatic focus and adding special accessories.
“Filming with iPhones allowed us to move without huge amounts of equipment,” Boyle said, noting that the team shot in parts of Northumbria that look like “it would have looked 1,000 years ago,” so the iPhone allowed them “to move quickly and lightly to areas of the countryside that we wanted to retain their lack of human imprint.”
