Apple continues to show off the iPhone 17 Pro’s impressive filmmaking capabilities with the release of ‘Glad I Met You’, a short that marks Chinese New Year.

The 12-minute film follows perennial pushover Lin Wei and a lost dog named Little White. Mixing live-action sequences with handcrafted stop-motion, director Bai Xue utilizes the iPhone 17’s 8x optical-quality zoom enabled by the 48MP Telephoto camera, 48MP Ultra Wide camera, 4K 120fps recording for cinematic slow motion, Cinematic mode, and Action mode. The film highlights the importance of friendship between humans and animals.

In a behind-the-scenes video, the production team lifts the curtain on filming with a smartphone, showing the iPhone being carried on an RC car to get dynamic, low-angle shots. A note on the video says “additional hardware and software used”, and in the BTS video a camera operator is seen using what looks like a fisheye lens attached to the iPhone 17. The crew also praised the device for its agility, able to slide into small spaces; useful for shooting puppets and little dogs.

Hao Shuai, the lead animal coordinator, says that iPhones are good for working with animals, who tend to get distracted by larger equipment. “It eliminated so many hurdles that we’d normally have while shooting,” Shuai notes.

Like Apple’s holiday ad, the film features puppets. But these ones were brought to life via stop-motion animation, with the each photo also shot on the iPhone 17 Pro.

Each character was built with custom internal armatures engineered to withstand thousands of micro-movements, while over 20 unique mouth expressions per character were 3D printed, hand-painted, and swapped frame-by-frame to match voice performances by well-known Chinese actors.

“Everything you see on screen in the stop-motion portion was built by hand, with care and love,” says Ege Soyuer, Creative Director at BUCK. “There’s something magical about knowing that what you see on screen actually exists in the real world, under lights, on a miniature set, moved millimeters at a time by real people.”

Image credits: Apple