When Tangerine premiered at Sundance in 2015, one detail immediately became part of the story. It had been shot on an iPhone. Not just a few scenes, but the entire film was captured on three iPhone 5s smartphones. This may sound like a gimmick or a clever way to generate hype and interest in a project, but for Sean Baker, the iPhone was the reason he could make the film he wanted to make.

Baker had already made several independent films by the time he started developing Tangerine. The problem was that the new film was asking for more than his budget could comfortably provide. The script, co-written with Chris Bergoch, followed two transgender sex workers across Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. It needed multiple locations, exteriors, an ensemble cast and the freedom to move around the city requiring a budget of around $100,000, roughly half what he had for his previous feature, Starlet.

The traditional solution would have been to reduce the ambition of the film. Baker decided to reduce the cost of making it instead.

The Solution

Baker wasn't initially excited about the prospect of shooting on a phone. In fact, he'd been looking at different ways to make the film work with a very limited budget when he came across a Vimeo channel dedicated to iPhone camera experiments. Then he found a Kickstarter campaign for a company called Moondog Labs.

They were developing an anamorphic lens adapter that could attach to an iPhone and produce a widescreen image, this changed Baker's mind. The phone could save them a huge amount of money, while the lens could give the footage a more cinematic quality.

As Baker later explained, the decision started as a financial one. The technology simply reached a point where he thought he could make it work creatively too, so they went for it.

The important thing about Tangerine is that Baker didn't try to make an iPhone film look like a $20 million movie. He used the limitations to his advantage. The tiny camera made it easier to move through Los Angeles. The production could work quickly and unobtrusively, helping Baker capture the streets, cars, shops and people that give the film its distinctive sense of place.

The small setup also allowed the filmmakers to put more of their limited money elsewhere. The production was now centered around the people and the locations. Baker found his two leads through the community he was trying to portray. Mya Taylor, who plays Alexandra, was discovered at an LGBT centre in Los Angeles and had no previous acting experience.

The result didn't look like a film made around a technical compromise, instead, it looked intentional.

Sundance

The film was revealed at Sundance in 2015 and received a strong reception, the fact that it had been shot on an iPhone became part of its mythology. It was widely reported as one of the festival's most unusual technical achievements.

However, the phone was only interesting because the film itself worked.Tangerine was funny, energetic, visually distinctive and full of characters who felt like they belonged to the world Baker was filming. The ‘gimmick’ got people to look and the filmmaking made them stay. Magnolia Pictures acquired the film after Sundance, and Tangerine went on to become one of the year's most talked-about independent films.

The Lesson

It's easy to take the wrong lesson from Tangerine. The lesson isn't:

"You can make a Sundance worthy film on an iPhone."

The iPhone didn't make Tangerine good, Sean Baker’s talent and abilities did. The more useful lesson is that Baker refused to let the equipment dictate the scale of his story. He wanted to make a film with multiple locations, a large cast and a restless visual style and couldn’t afford to this the traditional way.

That's what makes Tangerine such an interesting indie filmmaking case study. The limitation became part of the aesthetic and the camera that Baker chose because he couldn't afford something better became one of the first things people talked about when they saw the finished film.

There is a temptation in filmmaking to treat equipment as the barrier and also as an excuse. You need the better camera, the bigger crew, access to the proper locations, the bigger budget. Sometimes you do, but Tangerine is a useful reminder that sometimes the better question is:

What can we change about the way we're making this?

Baker couldn't afford the production he initially imagined. So he found a different way to build it. Three iPhones later, he had a Sundance film, and we all know how his career has gone since then…