iPhone Film festival at Macworld | iWorld 2012: (from left) IFF founder Ruben Kazantsev, Zsolt Haraszti, Craig Anthony Perkins, Adi Spektor, Conrad Mess and Wonsuk Chin. Photo: courtesy of Craig Anthony Perkins

The iPhone Film Festival (IFF) captured the moment at Macworld | iWorld 2012 with a talk and screening of movies by directors who are at the vanguard of new wave cinema.

“The iPhone has many uses, but don’t just use it for texting or calling, take it out and start shooting movies,” IFF founder Ruben Kazantsev told the audience as he introduced the film-makers from the main auditorium of the Moscone Center.

And it really is that simple, but the results can be highly impressive, as a quick showcase of work by previous winners of the IFF proved.

Macworld organisers and festival sponsors had also laid on a show with a food and drink reception and even a popcorn stand.

One of the audience members remarked that she had plans to go and see a movie in a theatre later, but she didn’t need to, the quality of the iPhone films shown on the big screen were just like the ‘real’ thing.

South Korean director Wonsuk Chin flew in from Seoul and delighted the Macworld crowd, some of them seeing iPhone films for the first time, with a special homage to Steve Jobs, simply called 992, after Jobs’s favourite brand of sneakers.

Jetlagged and exhausted, Chin admitted he had finished the film hours earlier and was nervous about showing his film to an audience for the first time.

Set in Seoul, 992 centred on a young guy reading the Jobs’ biography in a cafe who is asked out on a date to a Halloween party by a beautiful girl sat on the next table.

The guy decides to go to the party as his hero Steve Jobs, and sets about acquiring the look; buying a black polo neck top, Levis, and even the specs are not a problem, but obtaining a pair of Balance 992 sneakers proves more tricky.

No matter, the protagonist finally tracks down a pair in a dodgy shoe shop, and after a bit of haggling secures the complete Jobs’ look and goes to the party – where he is a hit with the girl and the rest of the crowd.

It’s a warm and witty take on the Apple ‘fanboy’ phenomenon, and bringing it to the spiritual home of the Mac proved a great gesture that was warmly appreciated. His film will be on YouTube in about a month’s time.

Chin is an accomplished film-maker; he has shown films at Sundance in the past he said, but he told the audience being invited to Macworld to premiere his film was as good if not better than being at Sundance. Chin’s film had a budget and he managed to raise finance from crowd-funding and commercial sponsors.

Isobel & The Witch Queen by Portland-based Craig Anthony Perkins had zero budget, he told the audience, but his offering was a great example of what you can do to pull together and shoot a story with such limited resources.

Even more remarkable was that Isobel & The Witch Queen is set in a magical dream realm, about a young girl’s quest to help her mother, which reminded me of the Narnia stories. Perkins told the audience the film was shot entirely on the iPhone 4S using the FiLMiC Pro and iSupr8 apps.

httpv://youtu.be/TE8C4C1ktx0

Conrad Mess followed up his award-winning film The Time Fixer by treating Macworld | iWorld 2012 to an exclusive showing of the trailer for his next film, Russian Roulette. Also on stage was producer Adi Spektor and they talked about how using the iPhone 4S proved invaluable in getting the shots from the various angles in the highly stylized Russian Roulette because it is so small – and it also means you don’t need to hire a bunch of expensive Cannon digital cameras, for example.

But a film set is a film set, and Spektor talked abut shooting for 24 hours one day, and having problems with actors quitting half way through so having to reshoot footage, which delays the schedule and adds to costs — but that’s filming.

There were no such problems for Zsolt Haraszti, who shoots hundreds of hours of time-lapse footage, a kind of year in the life, and then makes 365 second shorts.

He showed his latest, New York to London, a sequel to the award-winning Yearlapse ’10. It’s like a speeded up travel doc. All he has is his camera in his pocket, a time-lapse app and away he goes. The editing must be a nightmare, but it works, especially with his choice of soundtracks.

The iPhone Film Festival and other mobile film-makers have brought something new to Macworld this year and judging by the response from the audience there is a feeling that this side of the annual Mac expo is going to grow, as more people follow the lead set by not only film-makers, but musician and artists who have adopted Apple technology to create something truly unique.

The iPhone Film Festival (IFF) captured the moment at Macworld | iWorld 2012 with a talk and screening of movies by directors who are at the vanguard of new wave cinema. “The iPhone has many uses, but don’t just use it...