 Tangerine, a breakout hit from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is full of surprises. A low-budget production utilizing a cast of unknowns, the film follows two prostitutes, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) as they traverse the streets of Los Angeles in search of Sin-Dee’s cheating boyfriend. There’s almost nothing usual about this film, which was shot on an iPhone 5S and has a cast largely consisting of transgender characters played by transgender actors (which shouldn’t be unusual, but that’s the sad status quo). It was a decision that indie writer and director Sean Baker made to accommodate the film’s small budget. You’ve explored the lives of sex workers before with Starlet. But the story behind the camera is as surprising as what’s in front of it. Baker made the movie after becoming obsessed with a donut store in his neighborhood, a seedy block on Santa Monica Boulevard with a notorious reputation. Me and Chris Bergoch, my co-screenwriter, spent about eight months doing research, meeting people, telling them about this project, trying to hear stories. That idea led him and his co-writer, Chris Bergoch, to a nearby LGBT center, where they met Mya Taylor, an aspiring singer and actress, who in turn introduced the filmmakers to her roommate and eventual co-star, Kiki Kitana Rodriguez. "It was a chaotic corner — there was always something going on in Donut Time," he says. The unusual creative process behind Tangerine doesn’t stop with its camera. "You can make a beautiful film on a shoestring budget." Baker: She was there with some friends in the courtyard. "So you needed the Steadicam rig to stabilize it." The result, at least for me, is the ideal Sundance movie: totally unexpected, set in a world I’ve never visited, with a story the major studios wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot selfie stick. I wanted this to be right, I wanted to do it for myself. Plenty of amateur films have been shot using iPhones, but by all reports, this is the first movie at the Sundance Film Festival to be shot almost entirely on an Apple device. And yet despite his camera of choice, Baker says the iPhone made for a good partner. The thing is that I and the rest of the whole team are all cinephiles. At first, the cast wasn’t convinced shooting with the iPhone would work. We locked the camera down only four times in the film. You still need to know how a camera works," he says. There’s a lot that I’m trying to work on, but right now, I just want to focus on the movie and just get the movie out of the way and get it rolling.
– Tangerine surprised audiences at the Sundance Film Festival by depicting the gritty life of transgender prostitutes in Hollywood. Another revelation: The acclaimed film was shot almost totally on an iPhone 5S, the Verge reports. Indie writer/director Sean Baker says it was a budgetary choice that came with other advantages. For one thing, the 5S allowed him to make easily improvised camera movements, like circling the actors while filming on his bicycle. They used "all the benefits that thing has—the size, how light it is, how inconspicuous it is," Baker tells Los Angeles Magazine. "We had to embrace it. And it quickly became an aesthetic choice." An iPhone 5S film, aesthetic? Yep, he says, if you know how to use it. What you need: an $8 app called Filmic Pro that offers careful control of color temperature, aperture, and focus; a Steadicam to keep the iPhone from shaking; and anamorphic adapter lenses, like the Moondog Labs prototypes used by Baker's team. Still, the iPhone-film concept was so new that his cast needed reassurance. "I’m like, Jesus Christ, man, I was on The Wire," says James Ransone, who plays a pimp in Tangerine. "I’ve ended up in iPhone movies!" But he came to appreciate the phone's flexibility—like shooting in public areas without permissions or restraints, Slashfilm reports. Small downside: An argument between characters appeared so real that a bus driver called the cops. (For more on iPhones, read about a guy who strapped 94 of them to his body.)