Spark Lets You Make Oscar-Worthy Films on Your iPhone

Okay okay, Oscar-worthy might be a stretch. This (free!) app will seriously transform the way you capture, edit, and share videos. Whether it’s someone getting iced (yeah, we still do that) on their first day at work, a brand new puppy experiencing the ocean for the first time, or an epic first dance at your best friend’s wedding, videos are often the best way to capture a moment.

But, it’s unlikely that you have a lot of lead time to capture such a sporadic moment with your HD camera, so instead you end up capturing them on your phone. Aside from expensive software, there hasn’t yet been a way to easily edit your films together with beautiful filters, custom music, and the like. That is… until we tried out the Spark Camera app.

Designed by the creative geniuses at IDEO, this app is a free video app that lets you shoot, edit, and share beautiful movies in a matter of seconds.

Don’t let the images of clear tablets in this post fool you — this is actually an app for your iPhone! What’s different about this app is its seamless editing process. You can keep a number of Sparks open in editing mode, add clips as you record them, and then set your finished videos to the music of your choice. This means that you could spend large amounts of time working on a single video — maybe you take a short clip of your new baby every day until they are a year old, maybe you document every date night in your first year of marriage… you get the gist.

Here’s how the whole thing works: Once you’re in the app, you can press and hold anywhere to records. Release to stop. You can do this multiple times to create multiple clips. Then you can trim clips and edit them together to create your final film. Each film can be up to 45 seconds, and you can even have unlimited Sparks in progress.

Once you’ve got the moments edited, you can play your video and try out different filter options. Simply slide your finger through each filter during playback to see what color scheme best fits your film.

To add music, tap the music note and pull in any song from your library. If you need to leave the app and download a song on iTunes, you can totally do that — then come back and add your song.

As with most video and photo apps, you can save your finished product to your camera roll, and you can also share directly to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or email.

Boom, you’re a filmmaker!