Inside Apple's 5-Hour Ad, Shot on iPhone Without Recharging

Some might call it the stuff of a child's fantasy: Creeping through a cavernous museum while it's closed to the public, getting up close and personal with timeless masterpieces, and stumbling across mysterious moments that border on the supernatural. Others might call it a product demonstration. To illustrate the battery life of the iPhone 11 Pro, Apple and agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab London today unveiled an unprecedented epic of an ad, clocking in at 5 hours, 19 minutes and 28 seconds—all filmed on the smartphone in one take without ever recharging the battery. And at the end of the shoot, it still had 19% of its battery life remaining. You can get a flavor of the project with this trailer, which compacts the longer film's tour of the sprawling Hermitage museum in Russia into a more manageable 90 seconds: [kickout id="2"] The massively ambitious and logistically Byzantine project was the result of a 9-month collaboration between Apple Russia and TBWA\Media Arts Lab's London office. But despite all the lengthy preparations behind the spot, the shoot itself required an incredibly tight timeline that left almost no margin for error. Setup for the filming began as the Hermitage was closing at the end of a Sunday, then continued throughout the night. As the sun rose on Monday, when the landmark is closed for upkeep, the highly complex and delicate shooting began. The crew was given only a 6-hour window to film in, meaning the one-take shot would have to be nailed on the first attempt or else be crumbled into disaster by any technical disruption, fumbled fingers or errant jostle. And it worked. It actually worked. [kickout id="1"] Creating the spot in one seamless take with no cuts or postproduction trickery was, from the moment of inception, a mandatory part of the concept. Anything less wouldn't have the authenticity of a true demonstration of the iPhone 11 Pro's battery life. But pulling it off required months of planning, a tight shooting window and flawless choreography. In the early stages, this meant simply taking steps like testing how long the iPhone could record a video without stopping and still have a comfortable buffer of remaining life. The length was determined to be about 5 hours, setting the parameters for the shoot. The video, aimed at pushing the iPhone 11 Pro to its limits, is the first specific creative assignment to come out of Apple Russia, and even before the Hermitage was selected as the location, the project was aimed at being uniquely Russian in its scope and ambition. An early concept, for example, considered filming the extreme Russian wilderness. In the end, the Hermitage—the world's second largest museum, initiated by Catherine the Great in 1764—was chosen as the ideal venue for a 5-hour shoot. Stretching across 2.5 million square feet, the palace complex in St. Petersburg boasts more than 3 million artworks and antiquities, though only a relatively small percentage are on display. [kickout id="3"] Equally important as the backdrop, though, was the director. Chosen for the sweeping project was Moscow director Axinya Gog. At 29 years old, she has already created a large number of film projects within the art world and is considered one of Russia's rising-star filmmakers. She's also no stranger to museums, having largely grown up in one. Her mother was an art historian and curator at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery. Thanks to a combination of artistic vision and intimate experience, Gog proposed a shoot that was more soaring in its storytelling flow than some potential treatments that had been floated. Instead of a simple walk-through anchored to ground level in hopes of imitating a museum visitor's point of view, Gog envisioned the camera moving with ghostly patience through the museum's galleries, occasionally soaring into the air and even drifting into the center of performances. [kickout id="4"] Of course, such creative inventiveness requires no small amount of technical problem-solving. For one, the iPhone had to be transitioned among multiple devices, including a Steadicam, a dolly, a gimbal and even a crane. But once you got the iPhone onto the crane, how would you continue operating it? To do that, the team wrote an entire custom app that allowed them to use an Apple Watch as a remote control for the phone's video. This was far from the only inventive flourish in the film project. The font used for the title cards and credits, for example. was designed by the creative team based on the hall numbers found on signage throughout the museum. [kickout id="5"] A small phalanx crept along with the iPhone 11 Pro as it moved through the halls of the Hermitage. Trailing behind the phone were about seven people, including the director, art director, key film crew and a representative of the museum who was present at all times. Each had to move quietly to maintain the eerie and solemn silence of the real-time audio. (About 3.5 hours of musical score were later crafted for the video and layered on with customized precision.) The video culminates with a 30-minute performance by Russian pianist and composer Kirill Richter. The accompanying dance finale mimics the statuary of the previous hall. If you're wondering how a film crew could record more than 5 hours of single-take footage without any mistakes, you'll be glad to know there are a few small flubs that show even Apple's well oiled production machine can have a few hiccups. Around the 11:30 mark, for example, you can see the crew caught in a mirror. Even more charmingly, shortly after the 3-hour mark, the iPhone's line of sight drops briefly on accident, a moment of humanity that the filmmakers decided to embrace by pairing it with its own musical cue.

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How Apple Filmed a 5-Hour Ad on an iPhone 11 Pro in a Single Take Without Recharging

The gorgeous and ambitiously choreographed tour of Russia's Hermitage left almost no margin for error

David Griner

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David Griner