I have no idea if the Brad Pitt F1 movie will be any good, but there’s no question that the creators have taken the cinematography to heart. The director, Joseph Kosinski, is famous for his work on Top Gun: Maverick, after all, which was absolutely dazzling. To that end, Apple, the film’s primary financier, developed a special camera using the guts of an iPhone to capture onboard footage, because the Formula 1‘s typical broadcast cameras weren’t good enough for Hollywood duty.
Obviously, filmmakers strapped many different kinds of cameras in different positions on the fictional APX GP cars that Pitt and his co-star Damson Idris drive in the movie. However, they needed something to get that familiar offset overhead onboard shot that we see in F1 broadcasts. The cameras that normally capture that angle during actual racing record at a resolution too low for the big screen, and don’t offer granular control for things like color grading that movies require. Apple’s solution was to pack the camera system of an iPhone into one of the small winglet pods that hang off the air intake above the driver’s head.
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