Inside HVL: Phương Vũ on Directing MCK’s 360° Album Trailer with iPhone 17 Pro.

When a project involves a new piece of technology, it’s easy for the conversation to stop there. Cameras, specs, rigs, synchronization. But for director Phương Vũ, the making of MCK’s HVL album trailer became something far harder to categorize.

The project is, on paper, a large-scale collaboration between Apple, rapper MCK, and the Hanoi-based collective Antiantiart — built around a custom 360-degree rig using 8 iPhone 17 Pro synchronized via genlock. By any measure, a technically ambitious campaign. But the real pressure Phương was working under had nothing to do with specs.

“We had to ensure commercial viability without compromising artistic integrity. these two elements had to coexist, and the artistic quality had to be exceptionally high.”

Director Phương Vũ

That was the actual brief.

Watch the HVL album trailer below.

A Cycle, Not a Story

The concept for HVL didn’t begin with a camera. It began with an idea about death and return.

Phương and MCK — Long Ngơ, an artist he’s collaborated with across years — had been building the album’s visual language together long before production started. The album moves through three emotional states: Freedom, Chaos, and Pain. Three chapters. Three versions of the same person, each one dying so the next can be born – a Samsara cycle.

“Each character is distinct, and the core idea centers on their internal struggle — where one version dies for another to be born.”

That structure, cyclical rather than linear, made a 360-degree format feel like an extension of the concept rather than a technical overlay. In a traditional frame, the audience follows a direction. In 360, they orbit. They witness the loop from wherever they choose to stand.

The format was the idea. The iPhones came later.

The Rig

Standard 360 cameras create heavy warping — a fisheye distortion that immediately signals the format to the viewer and breaks immersion. The team’s solution was to stack multiple iPhone 17 Pro devices into a custom rig, achieving a flatter, more cinematic image quality with the kind of fidelity standard 360 cameras can’t reach.

The technical enabler was genlock on the iPhone 17 Pro, which allowed full timing and frame sync across all devices simultaneously — the entire rig functioning as a single, integrated system rather than a collection of separate cameras. In the past, that level of synchronization would have required highly specialized professional equipment.

But the rig also created a hard constraint that changed everything: because of the stitching process required to combine the footage, the camera had to stay fixed. Completely still.

For Phương, whose previous work is built on fast pacing, camera movement, and layered lighting atmospheres, this was not a minor technical limitation. It was the removal of almost every tool he normally relies on.

No camera movement. Exactly three cuts in the entire film. No post-production safety net. No CGI alternative route.

“It felt like a soldier going into battle without armor or a sword. Relying only on raw instinct.”

Director Phương Vũ

Rhythm From a Fixed Point

With the camera locked, the film’s entire sense of movement had to come from somewhere else.

The dancers became the answer. Not as performers within a frame, but as the mechanism through which rhythm, pacing, and emotional transition were created. Every movement had to do what a cut or a camera push would normally do — carry energy, signal change, sustain tension.

The choreography couldn’t simply be expressive. It had to be spatially precise.

From the earliest rehearsals, blocking was mapped exactly as it would be executed on set. The team divided the camera’s field of view into sections — Phương describes it as slices of a pizza — and established concentric circles from the center of the rig to measure exact distances: how far each dancer, each chair, each prop was from the lens. Nothing could cross a stitch line at the wrong moment. No performer could enter a warp zone in a way that would distort the image.

During production, Phương himself remained at the center of the rig, monitoring the feed directly, at the heart of the system he was trying to control.

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The Cathedral

Finding the right location was, by Phương’s own account, incredibly difficult.

The project required a space with genuine architectural scale and an avant-garde quality that could hold the visual ambition of the concept. What the team eventually found was a roofless cathedral — and that structural detail turned out to be decisive. Without a roof, the crew could rig an extensive lighting system from above, synchronized to the beat of the music, designed to shift the atmosphere of the space through different emotional states as the track moved.

“The cathedral seemed to shift through different states of time,” Phương says.

The wide lenses used in the rig created another spatial challenge: objects close to the camera read as enormous, while anything at a distance could quickly lose scale. To create the abstract, monumental environment the concept required, the art department built props reaching seven to eight meters — large enough to read correctly in the frame, and practically useful for masking stitch lines and giving performers more room to move.

The art direction, lighting choreography, dancer blocking, and device synchronization were all operating as a single system. Bill (DP) and Kevin (Art) — two key collaborators on set — were essential to making that coordination possible.

No Alternative Route

One of the defining characteristics of HVL as a production is that it had nowhere to hide.

In a project of this technical complexity, the temptation to defer difficult problems to post-production is real. Here, that option simply didn’t exist. Every image, every movement, every lighting state had to be right in-camera. The planning had to be complete before the shoot. Execution had to be precise.

“Everything had to be tangible and real,” Phương says. “There was no safety net, no alternative route.”

The complexity was as much mental as it was logistical. The project forced Phương to operate outside his established creative vocabulary — no cuts to reframe, no movement to redirect attention, no effects to fix what didn’t work. In that sense, the technology didn’t simplify the work. It made the human part of the work more exposed.

“This project made me realize that the more we are challenged by technology, the more our humanity is brought to the forefront.”

When technology is integrated with intention rather than used as a solution, it raises the stakes for everything around it. 8 iPhone 17 Pro setup, synchronized across devices via genlock, expanded what was technically possible. But the result still depended entirely on preparation, choreography, spatial thinking, and the ability of a crew to solve problems under pressure without a backup plan.

Antiantiart

For Phương, HVL was never only a high-profile commercial project.

Antiantiart is not a production company in the conventional sense. It’s a collective that built itself from scratch in Hanoi, at a time when the filmmaking community in Vietnam was still developing into what it is today. When this project came, the team didn’t look outside for experts to solve the hardest problems. They relied on each other.

Everyone on set was part of their inner circle: artists who are close friends, the music team from Antiantiart, young Hanoi-based creatives running the art department, and dancers Phương has known since high school.

“What made that day truly special was the bond on set: we were all close friends who had grown up together, taking every step side-by-side to reach this point.”

Standing together in that cathedral, under a lighting rig built to pulse with a friend’s music, they were also making a statement about what a filmmaking community in Vietnam and Southeast Asia could produce. Having their creative vision respected at that scale marked, in Phương’s words, a pivotal milestone for Antiantiart.

What Matters Most

When asked what should not be missed in telling the story of this project, Phương’s answer is immediate.

Friendship.

Behind the rig, the synchronization system, the choreography mapped like a spatial grid, the roofless cathedral, the lighting system synchronized to a beat — HVL is the result of a group of people who grew together, trusted each other, and found a way to turn a technically impossible challenge into a shared creative language.

That’s the part that doesn’t show up in the specs.

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HVL was shot on an iPhone 17 Pro using a custom multi-device 360° rig with genlock synchronization. Directed by Phương Vũ / Antiantiart.

Read more about Phương here.