In V Renee's blog, The Feature Film That Blew Everyone Away at Sundance Was Shot on an iPhone 5s, filmmaking as a method accessible to the average person is discussed at length. Renee's analysis highlights the emergence of iPhone filmmaking not only within social media and at-home featurettes, but also in the professional world (such as Sundance Film Festival). Weaving personal opinion with analytical thought, Renee makes strong use of Jenkins' defining characteristics of pop culture to analyze Tangerine:
"Smartphone filmmaking is still a long way away from not only being fully on par with traditional feature filmmaking, but also being accepted as a legitimate form of feature filmmaking. Personally, I love it. I've always loved it. When the Moment lenses hit Kickstarter, I bought a set. When Moondog's Anamorphic Adapter hit Kickstarter, I bought it. Any app that can turn my iPhone into a little filmmaking tank of fury, I'm all over it.
When you shoot with an iPhone, are you loosing some control over your instrument. Yes. Are you losing image quality. Of course. Does it matter? Maybe not as much as you think, considering the fact that The Hollywood Reporter described the look of Tangerine as “crisp and vigorously cinematic”, with “an aesthetic purity that stands out in a field where so much indie filmmaking has gotten glossier and less technically adventurous.”
One may acknowledge the creation of iPhone films as a testament to the cultural characteristic of accessibility. The project, overall, cost under $1,000 to produce - from the iPhone itself to the added audio and HD equipment essential for perfecting the film. That price tag alone is enough to urge the average user to create her own audio-visual art.
As a story that follows two transgendered women on an odyssey through many subcultures of Los Angeles, the film also appropriately correlates to the idea of pop culture 'contextualism.' The art, in this case, exists in relation to broad social and cultural discourses essential for provoking thought and consideration. Renee acknowledges that various cultural aspects that this iPhone-made film incorporates.
