This Ex-Teacher Invented a Hollywood Filmmaking Device for Your iPad

Charlie Hoehn
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

This is a guest post by David Basulto, author of Life Camera Action and founder of iOgrapher.

My life changed forever when I encouraged my students to make movies with their iPhones and iPads.

Students are often bound by rigid curricula and a lack of tools, so I let them play with the intuitive devices already in their pockets. Most had iPhones or Samsungs, and I had a few iPads. Their curiosity led as they tapped and played and created, and they learned at an incredible rate.

We were streaming football games live, with four different angles, to YouTube. We were shooting the school play, and filming full-length movies.

Teachers started getting into it. They filmed Shakespeare recitals in English class, and then played the film back to students so they could correct mistakes.

I was amazed; this wasn’t the dark ages I’d grown up in. Anyone with the desire to make a movie could make a movie. The world was open for storytellers of all ages, experience levels, and budgets.

Still, there were problems.

The footage was often shaky, the audio was horrible, and so was the lighting. Filming with iPhones and iPads had potential, but we needed to fix those issues.

I tinkered with the idea of a case with handles on both sides, to fix our main issue of stability. Nothing on the market existed to solve this problem, so I made a prototype myself, using a 3D-printer in my classroom.

Then, one of my kids introduced me to Kickstarter. We raised money and got covered by Forbes, Mashable, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications; they loved the story of a teacher unleashing his students’ creativity by using iPads.

We reached our financial goal, but then I realized I had no idea how to actually produce the things.

Again, my students saved me.

One of their moms owned an injection modeling company. We met and decided to make everything locally, in California, and she got the ball rolling.

Another student’s parents owned a packaging company.

Another student’s parent, a senior executive at Disney, took me and the students to Disney Studios.

I brought my iPad and handled case, which I called an iOgrapher, and he was struck. He wrote a big check, and all of a sudden, I was a first-time entrepreneur at fifty-one years old.


My students showed me the future; they don’t even watch TV anymore. They’re on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

They don’t care if the video is shot in 4K; they just want a good story.

They want to be entertained.

iOS devices level the playing field and let the best stories rise to the top. Having the best equipment or the most money has become irrelevant. A phone is good enough. The beauty is, mobile devices improve every year.

The movie Tangerine was shot entirely on an iPhone 5. It won the Sundance Film Festival, got picked up by a major distributor, and netted a worldwide distribution deal. It had a nice run at local theatres and is now available on iTunes.

It was produced for almost nothing.

The creators didn’t even need permits. They had a story they believed in, and they went out, shot it, and brought it to life with an outdated iPhone.

Who’s going to be the next Spielberg, Lucas, or Coppola?

A kid with an iPhone can get started, today.

David Basulto is the author of Life. Camera. Action.

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Charlie Hoehn

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Author of Play It Away. Keynote Speaker. Head of Video at scribemedia.com

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