How we created the kickoff of our iPhone 11 Pro test

A few times a year, when we review flagship phones such as the latest iPhone, Galaxy Note or Google Pixel, the video team of The Verge wants to open these video reviews with a cliché "hero" sequence that reveals the produced in a truly creative and beautiful way. It's a chance to get by pushing our creative boundaries and showing off our passions. We always try to go beyond what we did before. For the review on the iPhone 11 Pro, the one to beat was the first push to send our Galaxy Fold review.

This time, we wanted to try something slightly more ambitious than usual. We have documented all the steps necessary to complete the final plan. Here is the detail of the creation of this beautiful photo above, which involved spray paint, fishing wire, motorized platforms and some post-production magic.

We started by previewing the configuration in Cinema 4D by mocking a table, a lightbox (with 3D light), floating objects and an iPhone 11 Pro model.

Once we had a preview, we started to recreate it in our studio. We first painted the floating objects with the bomb. (Fortunately, Edge video director Becca Farsace had already done it in advance!)

Then, using a fishing line, we spaced the objects over a lightbox in our studio, thus leaving a placeholder where the iPhone 11 Pro would eventually square. (More on that later.)

We decided that it would be more practical to do the rotation in position, but we wanted to get a parallax effect. So we installed a camera on an automatic trolley. We used a fairly wide lens and used a higher frame rate, knowing that we would need more space on all edges of the shot and that we might need to re-encrypt the footage.

We then left all the configuration intact for about two hours while we were working on other parts of the exam. When you shoot objects that you want to capture in the air and are hanging on a fishing line, they must be absolutely immobile or the effect may be destroyed. We then turned the camera on five or six times until we were sure to have it.

Then we moved the camera to the final position and began to cut the objects one by one, paying close attention to the order in which they fell, depending on their position and weight, so as not to overly interact.

Then we imported the footage into After Effects where, after a little rotoscopy and compilation, we matched the moment of the fall of all the objects.

After it felt good, we started getting the real phone in the sequence. We previously agreed that filming the phone at the same time would have been a nightmare, so we filmed it separately in a completely different studio.

We have reproduced the lighting configuration of the previous plan – except that this time everything was on his side. We filmed a few 360-degree rotations of the phone so we could match the lighting from the previous shot. We then imported this video and stabilized it so that the phone is locked and the light turns around it.

We then masked the phone, which basically means you remove all the rest of the frame (the table, the motorized head, the cables, etc.). Then we combined the phone with the falling objects into a sequence and made all the final settings (then made some changes). more final tweaks), added the title, (a final final tweak), and boom:

Magic.