iPhone Does Sole Music Video Duty For Leann Rimes

Smartphone cameras are convenient but "proper photographers" need proper equipment, or so the advice has traditionally gone, but following news of Nokia powering celebrity weddings, now the iPhone weighs in with country singer Leann Rimes. The artist's next single, Gasoline and Matches, has a video completely filmed using Apple's iPhone, including stop-motion video pieced together from more than 8,000 stills.

The footage is the handiwork of director and co-producer Ian Padgham, who had already been making a name for himself on Vine with his stop-motion shorts. He's already done work with Microsoft around Xbox One launch events.

Padgham worked with co-producer Darrell Brown on the Leann Rimes project, using three iPhones in total to run the project. Only one was actually used for filming, however; the others were for playing back the track so that it could be matched up with the graphics, and for documenting the whole process itself.

So, gimmick or a sign that smartphone cameras are truly coming of age? When most music videos are consumed on YouTube these days – and probably not even switched into the highest possible resolution – you could well argue that the picture quality has already taken a backseat to camera flexibility.

The iPhone 5s, for instance, has a slow-motion video recording mode which cranks up the framerate to a hefty 120fps, rivaling the abilities some standalone cameras only recently have gained. Meanwhile, devices like the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display have effectively become portable multimedia studios, with Apple bundling free copies of iMovie and iPhoto for the tablets.