Top Spot of the Week: Apple, Director Takashi Miike, TBWA\Media Arts Lab Tokyo Come Up With Cab Fare In Suspenseful "Midnight" Short

For the latest Shot on iPhone film in Japan, Apple partnered with renowned director Takashi Miike and TBWA\Media Arts Lab in Tokyo to create a 19-minute, live-action adaptation of Midnight, a 1986 manga series by Manga guru Osamu Tezuka--shot entirely on iPhone 15 Pro. 

The Midnight short is a suspenseful drama about a taxi driver who encounters strange passengers during his night rounds. The cabbie ends up pulled out of his way to help a female truck driver, Kaede, who’s being pursued by a hitman.

Midnight combines live-action shots with CGI and pioneers the use of the LiDAR scanner on iPhone in film postproduction, in order to create the 3D model base for the Taxi and its fifth wheel.

The film will play on TV, online TV, digital, social, out-of-home, digital out-of-home, and in taxi cabs in Tokyo. The cab fare finds Midnight running in select taxis all around Tokyo after 10pm until morning.

Director Miike stated, “Mr. Tezuka is something of a god among manga artists so it was an honor to take on the challenge of expressing his work using only iPhone. As we were shooting, I naturally began to challenge myself to think about how we could make a work unique to iPhone, beyond the usual approach to a film. I truly felt that the iPhone has the power to do things that a conventional movie camera can’t.”