You must have at least once experienced that a technical appliance decided to give up on you just when you needed it most? During life’s important moments (or even those less important ones, when you just want the thing you paid big amounts of money for to function in correspondence with its price), Murphy’s Law is exactly what you DON’T need applying to you!

A colleague of mine and I went to make and film an interview at Stockholm’s city planning offices and our camera that is normally rather easy to handle, suddenly became a big problem: it kept showing that its memory is full in spite of the fact that we just put in a fresh memory card with 32GB of space. With several failed attempts to figure out what the problem is, our interviewee waiting for us to start, and with the two of us getting increasingly frustrated, I resorted to the only possible option: try filming it with an iPhone!

Truth be told, I can’t exactly brag with my experience with filming; as a former television journalist I mostly stood in front of the camera and never behind it, and filming my friend’s kids singing Christmas songs doesn’t really make me a Steven Spielberg. However, our deadline was short and we needed the film (that naturally also needed to be edited), so an iPhone turned out to be our only option.

Here is the result of that day’s work: not exactly an Oscar-worthy performance, but still something we could show to the participants of a seminar that we organized for the Ukrainian Energy Agency.

P.S. Two tips on filming with an iPhone:

1. Make sure to have a proper meal before you go and film for more than three minutes because your shaking hands might render the film completely unusable (If you had a chance to see the video, you’ll probably be able to notice that I skipped my breakfast).
2. Always keep your iPhone in a horizontal position when filming, otherwise you’re running the risk of having a vertical photo-like effect on the screen, with most of the screen remaining black and the actual video ending up being a weird strip showing some detectable motion somewhere in the middle of your TV… you’ll see what I mean after you’ve viewed the video.