An article in The New York Times this weekend asked if the iPhone could revive the home movie, noting that photo apps like Instagram, PicPlz, and Path had added “cool effects to amateur cellphone pictures, transforming them into bite-size pieces of art” and had made mobile photography a big business.
Certainly home videos are already a big business without the iPhone’s help, with sites like YouTube and Vimeo enabling millions of people to share their home movies. But can better filters and better sharing – right from within the device – give stylized home videos that same chance to turn into something bigger?
The release today of the Silent Film Director app could be the thing. And even if it doesn’t become the next big filtering and sharing craze, it is certainly a cool new way to make iPhone videos.
The app (which is $.99 for the regular version and an additional $.99 for the Pro version) lets you add several different color filters to your videos so that they appear in the style of silent films from the Twenties or home videos from the Sixties or Seventies.
You can also adjust the video speed so that films have that same not-quite-real-time playback. There are soundtracks you can add, as well as the option to score the film based on music in your iTunes catalog.
The Pro version also lets you trim the video and add separate title cards and transitions.
Just as the filters in Instagram and the like have added a patina to all our mobile phone photos, perhaps we’ll see an explosion of mobile phone videos now, all with a different sort of retro lens.
