‘Olive’: The first movie to be shot on a mobile phone
Technology has rapidly developed since the inception of cinema in the late 1800s. It’s hard to comprehend how much has changed since the early days of filmmaking when sound and colour were absent from the big screen, and everything had to be edited by hand.
Yet, these days, an entire movie can be made on a smartphone, from filming to editing to uploading. The first smartphone was released in 1992 by IBM, although it wasn’t until 2000 that a device emerged with the ability to capture photos.
However, when Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, smartphones began to truly take off. Steve Jobs called the invention “a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.”
In 2009, the iPhone 3GS became the first iPhone to record video. Yet, despite Apple’s dominance in the smartphone market, Nokia beat Apple to it with their N95 model, released in 2007, which could capture video at 30 frames per second.
It seems as though Nokia were more ahead of the curve than people might realise. The first movie to be shot entirely on a smartphone – Hooman Khalili’s Olive – was recorded on a Nokia N8. While Nokia had no involvement in the project, it was a turning point for the industry, suggesting that movies can be made on an incredibly limited scale without a sizable budget or expensive equipment.
Olive was filmed with the Nokia N8 mounted on a tripod, and a 35mm lens was added to give the movie a more cinematic feel. What’s more, the movie features frequent John Cassavetes collaborator Gena Rowlands in one of the leading roles. In fact, the film’s unusual camera setup partly inspired Rowlands to join the project, with Khalili revealing during an interview with The Telegraph: “I sent her the script, and she said to me: ‘I read six scripts a week and I maybe do one movie a year. This script is so good, [but] I need you to convince me to do this movie’.”
“So I sat there, and for an hour and a half, I poured my heart out to her. She did it, not for the money. She [is] an independent spirit, and she liked the fact that it was the first cellphone movie,” he added.
Discussing the idea behind his film, Khalili explained, “In January 2010, I came up with this idea and I saw there was nothing out there that existed. This is groundbreaking technology. You know someone is gonna be first, and there’s something special about being first. And yeah, our lens might be big and clunky, but this is how first generations of new technology are.”
Since the release of Olive, many other films have been shot on smartphones, like Sean Baker’s Tangerine (filmed on an iPhone 5s) and his Oscar-nominated The Florida Project, which featured an end scene captured on an iPhone 6s Plus. Elsewhere, Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane and Michel Gondry’s short film, Détour, both used an iPhone 7 Plus.
