[berkut]

One thing I'm curious about is how they avoided lens flair from small bright lights - the iPhone's lenses in my experience produce multiple very pronounced lens flares when shooting bright lights (and older iPhones used to produce one large green flare as well, but I think that's been reduced in the 14 and 15 - I'm sure other phones do as well, I'm just only familiar with iPhones these days).

Very large light sources likely helped (as did the matte boxes), but maybe they carefully chose the camera angles as well to minimise this?

[kergonath]

> Very large light sources likely helped (as did the matte boxes), but maybe they carefully chose the camera angles as well to minimise this?

All of it, I think. In my experience these ugly flares come mostly from point sources (things like streetlights), so large, soft light sources should help. Also, the matte boxes help controlling where the light that hits the lens comes from, so in effect it makes it easier to have a good angle, on top of making sure that nothing hits the glass at a small angle.