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I’m surprised to hear that statement from you Andrew, knowing you love optics so much (at least when going back in time, reading your posts). Images shot with great, characteristic optics are a different beast from AI-powered, small sensor cameras. It’ll take a while before fake DoF will use realistic depth fall off and deal with moving hair, etc. It’ll take a while before it can simulate actual lenses. And even then, these effects are ‘post’ and not part of the actual image acquisition phase. Which is fine as long as we don’t expect phones to be devices for true professional cinematic productions. I agree the writing is on the wall (it has been for years) and consumer and soon prosumer cameras are fine with iPhones and DJI 1” Osmo cameras, but shouldn’t we start to look at full frame DSLRs as professional workhorses for entirely different use cases? I haven’t brought my DSLR to any holiday for the last 10 years because it simply sucks to carry such a device when dealing with two kids. A $1500 smart phone is super expensive but not that crazy as long as it provides an excellent camera shooting experience. Meanwhile the Japanese manufacturers keep pushing out hardware that still operates like a 1990s camera with software that provides a 1990s user experience. No real innovation there. This is why I believe in companies like DJI more - they truly look at the audience of today, face value. They will start to capture the future professional audience, while Apple and Samsung take the low to mid-end. Meanwhile Sony, Canon, Panasonic, Fuji will serve a shrinking market as long as they keep essentially selling the same stuff as they have been doing for decades

To me the perfect embodiment of the four-thirds mount was actually the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema camera, which technically speaking was only using the mount but equipped with a smaller sensor. The only true ‘pocket cinema’ in my book. That camera was so much fun shooting. It was imperfect, having to change the damn battery every 15 minutes, amongst other quirks and limitations. But the shooting *experience* was completely different from other cameras because it left out anything else and the interface was simple. The footage felt very…organic. Something I haven’t seen in their later products. Not sure what it is. I used it often in combination with a pancake lens while having the flexibility to mount other lenses. I have 4 lenses collecting dust (and a broken GH5 which died when I forgot to turn it off, using it as a webcam). Why is no company making a new version of this concept? It’ll be optically superior to a phone.

I had the opportunity to work with Nolan and Zimmer directly (from a game development perspective) on both Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises. With the former game we also collaborated with Kip Thorne. Learned from how these guys work as much as I could, with the short time given. I think Nolan was tired of Batman when he embarked on the last one (and it shows IMHO). After that film I noticed his movies gradually got a lot more exposition, dialogue got more heavy-handed and the narrative structure in my opinion was over-complex. Why tell Dunkirk in a non-linear fashion? It’s almost as if he wants to hide a lack of story. At least Memento, which I love, uses this functionally: we as as an audience experience his memory loss. I think my favorites are the early ones: Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins. Maybe Tarantino is right, and directors have a shelf life, after which they start to smell funny.

Oppenheimer’s attempt portraying the Dutch language horribly fails. It’s some kind of German? Not a big Nolan fan myself - at least his later work. Too much exposition, non-lineair story-telling, inaudible dialog, frontal lobe numbing music and heavy-handed dialogue.

The last 18 months have changed me completely as well. No more traveling because the company “is remote first”, no more creative minded colleagues, it’s all about process and numbers. All Zoom meetings are to the point, no more laughing. Dealing with 9 hour time difference (USA HQ) The 2 years before that was helping my wife with her rehabilitation after she suffered a stroke. Which was hard with a 1.5 year old and a 7 year old. We were back in the Netherlands coincidentally (we came back to NL for friends and family) when it happened, and so I decided to immigrate back not knowing whether she was going to recover and be able to speak and walk again. The immigration causes all kinds of financial challenges (taxes, insurance) which cost me close to $100K in the end. These events - rehabilitation, lockdown and now isolation shook me to my core. It changed me. I feel completely burned out. Life has gotten more “bare” and I have to find myself again, find what I truly care about. Connect with people, build something new. Add on the fact I’m 41 and probably having midlife crisis at the same time (proof: I drive a Tesla!), and the party is complete. Sorry for the long story - what I’m trying to say is that your personal struggle resonates with me and I want you to know that many people around me including myself have severely struggled the last 2 years. Social media didn’t help either; it has created a fake lens of the world, especially the last few years. It’s like 99% of the people are acting or presenting a version of themselves, instead of being themselves. Things will get better, but as you said you may have to force change. Whatever you choose to do next, I wish you all the best. Never, ever give up the values you live by. Take care.

I just found my original BMPCC in a box after moving and I realized how much fun it was shooting with this camera, despite all its shortcomings. It are the limitations and the singular focus, stripping it to the core, that makes it such a pleasure to shoot with. I never used the newer cameras but they don’t seem “pocket” at all, and a bit of overkill to carry along.

I think camera companies are disconnected to what consumers really want and are afraid of positioning their products completely different. As an example, I want a large sensor webcam for vlog work and meeting. Just to put on a tripod, that’s it. Remote work and still having shitty webcams, OR having to pay too much money on a full camera I don’t want. I want a vlogging camera, like Sony released, but without the crappy 8-bit video codec and their shitty control system for under $750, including lens. I’m not paying over $1200 for a full kit if my phone is right next to me, but at the same time I want better optics. I do not want it to take pictures, I need a drastically easier menu system like Blackmagic products have, and I want amazing autofocus. The lens can be fixed. Likewise, I am ok spending between $2-3K on a cinema camera with amazing autofocus because I don’t have a crew with focus-puller for my solo work, and this one needs to ProRes or BRAW on an SSD I can stick in the camera. eND filter. No photos, simple menu system focused on filmmaking (there are dozens of options on the market if I want to take pictures). The problem with mirrorless cameras is that they are positioned as dull, Swiss-army knife devices that don’t dare to make any choices. By their choices to want to cater for everyone, they can’t become specialized, clearly positioned machines to solve one task really well.

That’s a weird comment coming from you 🙂 Aren’t you doing the same in your videos, and even addressing individual YouTubers with critique to make your point about the state of the industry? Saying what you don’t like about them is the same thing as telling them what you’d rather would like see them doing. If you are willing to post these videos, you should be willing to receive feedback, regardless of whether you agree to it or not. This just feels dismissive.

This right here. I am not enjoying your rants, Andrew, because (a) it’s a losing game, (b) makes you come across as bitter and (c) doesn’t seem to be your ‘groove’ and doesn’t accentuate your differentiation and strength. Whether you are right or wrong isn’t the point; you can’t change the rules of the game and it doesn’t make for entertaining content. In my opinion, your strength is the intersection point between technology and creativity (I would love to see more of the latter to balance the tech side). You aren’t competing with bloggers, YouTube’s or even cinematographers if you create your own category. And that doesn’t mean you can’t voice a strong opinion as part of your concept. I just would rather see you fight FOR something instead of AGAINST.

Most people don’t know what product they need. They have a problem or goal and the product needs to solve that. Their perception of what the right product is, is often what’s the gold standard (and most of the time a conservative concept that hasn’t essentially changed), until a disruptor changes everything - and revolutionizes the entire industry with something completely new. It’s like everyone wanted a Nokia, until Apple showed up and Nokia was a goner. The problem with Sigma is that they may have created some original, daring concepts here, but it’s not revolutionary at all. It’s just some new ideas within the same old paradigm, the same form factor. Not worth going for. People then just see it as a risk and stay with what they’re used to. The entire traditional camera industry bores the crap out of me. Nothing happens. Just iterations in a shrinking market.

This is a really good point and is certainly the case for me. I don’t really add a lot of “new classics” to my collection but often look back at the ones that I discovered at a younger age, which I’m now showing to my kids, and makes me excited all over again. It is definitely a part of our perception of “things were better in the past”, even if that’s a highly subjective. For me another part is “polish”. Filmmaking and post-(production) technology is so advanced right now that I look back at the craft of filmmaking from times before those advancements. The unpolished editing, camera motion/lens use, practical effects etc, are all specific. constraints that I really love and add to the “rawness”, especially in 70s to 90s films.

One of the other issues not mentioned in the article I think is that writers don’t have the time to properly marinate their screenplays anymore. Quantity above quality. A past example is The Matrix trilogy. The first one had very smart written dialogue and references and fantastic action, the other two movies which had to be created under the weight of the success of the first movie, tried to cover up ‘smart’ with ‘deep’ philosophic nonsense and pointless chase scenes. No single scene in Matrix 1 was unnecessary. I feel a lot of what’s being created today falls into that last bucket, writing wise (which trickles down to direction, time for actors to get in character and editing). Luckily there’s still a lot of true quality out there, but even that starts to feel unimaginative. I compare it with jazz or a complex wine that requires an open mind and acquired taste, versus sterile smooth jazz or a coke. There’s even the problem of what I call “fake creative authenticity” for a lack of better words. Take the show “The Boys” which deliberately delivers a quirky, weird and violent show, but you can just feel it has been choreographed by marketeers. It’s incredibly well produced, slick, but for once I would like to see some raw edged, unpolished parts and a director and writer who truly don’t give a fuck. They’ll have an incredibly hard time realizing to a larger market. The best way forward in this industry is to take something people are comfortable with and mix it up or add something to it - but that’s marketing choreography 😞

I would have agreed with you early 2000s, but not in 2021. You are assuming cinema shooting is still done the same way. It’s not just a marketing trick, and also with AFC, it would sell much better to that “YouTube audience” (which if you like it or not, has become the ‘standard’). “Cinema” is not a static definition. Even Blackmagic positions this as a camera for a wide range of uses including interviews and documentaries, for which continuous AF is terrific, especially when the subject and camera is moving, and the crew is very small.

The problem I have with Blackmagic Pocket specifically is the lack of AFC which I feel is important to have nowadays. Most of us won’t be shooting with a full crew and focus puller. I had hoped this camera would have been equipped with Lidar or another sensor + the software algorithms to keep subjects in focus while shooting. I would gladly have paid $500 more for this.

True, and I have that background myself having founded and run a games studio for over 13 years. However, filmmaking’s strengths (to me) are about human connection, either fiction or documentary. You have to spend a lot of money to copy that when working in real time engines, which are in return obviously great at interaction and non-linearity. To me both can be placed on a Venn diagram where the overlap is cinematography and storytelling, but outside that overlap have clear strengths.