In this first ever episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Angela Blake, co-founder and director of SF3 - the Smartphone Film Festival, about the future of smartphone filmmaking.

Main takeayaways from the interview:

• “It's now a lot more mainstream and people are choosing to make films on phones or choosing the phone to be their camera of choice. And for many reasons and budgeting being a huge one of those, you can get an amazing quality film, a professional film for something you already have in your pocket, which is that phone.”

• “And a lot of people are now choosing to make those films with their phones because the money they would have spent on a camera they can now spend in post-production making their films, much better in the editing and the composition and things like that.”

• “The filmmaking space has really exploded. There's big Hollywood players making films on phones, quite a lot of Hollywood films and some even some Oscar nominated films have been partially filmed on phones.”

• “What I really am trying to do is to be invested in the filmmakers and in the community itself.”

• “We always teach at SF3 that you do not need anything to make a film. You just need your imagination.”

• “You can also use those on a phone these days with special cages and there's stabilisers, cages, special tripods and a million different apps, which will turn your phone into a DSLR itself or can capture any kind of image that you're after.”

• “I always say, use your phone to make a film, but if you can buy a microphone, buy a microphone. And so that film that's being shot with the additional microphone is going to sound better.”

• “We kind of saw that you could lose faith if you allow yourself to grow, but forget where you came from and forget what your mission is. So we have introduced awards in our festival. We have a first time filmmaker award and this first time filmmaker.”

• “We make sure we put a certain number of first time filmmakers in with our big gala category, with all the other professional filmmakers, because we never want to lose sight of what we actually are here for. Our mission is to inspire everybody.”

• “Audiences these days are inundated more than any other audiences through time with content. There is so much content, whether you're watching social media content, or name your streaming device.”

• “The number one thing I have to really make sure that people know is the story. Story. It is all about the story.”

• “The number one thing I really notice is people aren't spending enough time in the pre-production, which is in that kind of writing and planning stage of their film.”

• “The second thing, and this is very much mobile related, is sound. Audience is going to forgive bad acting. You know, they're going to forgive a camera going in and out of focus. They're going to forgive a slightly very slightly shaky camera. They're going to forgive many other elements, but they're not going to forgive bad sound ever.”

• “I definitely think phones are never going to replace the big movie cameras because all the big movie camera companies are also innovating and changing up what they're doing as well and getting smaller and getting all different features.”

• “The human connection and emotions and stories that film conveys to that audience will never change.”