Apple's Shot on iPhone campaign casts a new light on Singapore's infamous chicken rice war

Apple Singapore just released its first, locally made “Shot on iPhone” film to whet our appetites. True to our love for hawker food, the short story touches on one of the biggest chicken rice wars to ever grace Maxwell Food Centre.

Titled Poached, the five-minute-long mini-documentary receives a first-hand retelling of the long rivalry between Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice and Ah Tai Hainanese Chicken Rice stalls located in Maxwell Food Centre at Tanjong Pagar.

Clearly, Apple plays it straight with well-established Singaporean stereotypes – in that we love food photography, our hawker fare, and real-life drama.

The Chinese title plays on the idiom “有机可趁” (making use of a great opportunity), where 机 (jī), which means ‘opportunity’, was swapped out with the phonetically-identical 鸡 (jī), the Chinese character for chicken (and thus, gaining advantage through chickens).

[embed]https://youtu.be/kU9Y2F2TQgE[/embed]

Viewers of the short film are also treated to gratuitous close-ups and slow-motion shots of the signature dish itself. The director for Poached is none other than David Gelb, the same creative brain behind Netflix’s Chef Table and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, as well as Disney’s Wolfgang.

Notably, the documentary’s camera was an Apple iPhone 13 Pro, which had the Cinematic Mode and Macro shooting chops working with its slim build to navigate each hawker stall’s constrained working environments.

In fact, we don’t even need to tell you how it was done because Apple also put out its behind-the-scenes footage on the making of Poached.

That’s all we can really say without spoiling the clip. Go watch it if you love chicken rice, food photography, or competitively delicious hawker fare.

ALSO READ: Here are the winners of the Apple Shot on iPhone challenge

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.