How Smartphones are Challenging Traditional Production
Video is thriving, yet cameras are dying. I’m not talking about top of the line cameras - we use those all of the time in my other business. There’s no shortage of high end productions, and companies like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon have all pledged billions towards producing video content.
I’m talking about regular people using regular cameras. You know, those things you used to own. The cameras you bought to capture life’s best moments: children’s birthday parties, family holidays, and vacations. I pretty much documented my entire life on those things.
I still capture those moments & memories, I just do it with a phone and you probably do, too. The phone has now become the center of the consumer creative world…a world that more and more is becoming video first. Even RED, who arguably manufactures the best high end cameras on the market, is making a phone. Kodak made a phone, Leica adapted their famous lenses for phones, and GoPro has struggled to get their cameras to work better with phones. Snap, an app company & social network, even calls themselves a “camera company.”
It’s a matter of connectivity and convenience. Our phones are connected, our cameras are not. Plus, over the last 5 years the cameras on our phones have become so amazing that there’s not much of a quality difference anymore. I was in Mexico recently watching a beautiful sunset and I noticed a woman next to me using a prosumer camera. After a couple minutes she whipped out her phone and captured the same scene. It was such a great moment, but she wanted to share it NOW. There was no need to wait for the slightly better version.
World-renowned director Steven Soderbergh released a full feature film earlier this year shot on an iPhone. It wasn’t the first of its kind, but I saw it at the theaters and was blown away at the notion that 700 million people across the globe have the same tools to create something of that quality…right in their pocket. If feature films can be made with a phone, certainly we can make all sorts of social content with it.
There’s a pushback from veteran creatives on using such amateur methods of creating, but the reality is that the speed, the cost, and the execution of traditional production doesn’t match the speed and style at which the world consumes. In fact, the videos we create with Cinebody outperform content made with “professional cameras” that costs 1,000 times more and takes 10 times longer to produce.
I’m not sure how the camera landscape will evolve but I can positively say that the camera inside your phone is only going to get better and better. And with 700 million potential creators that can collaborate instantly from the cloud, we at Cinebody are excited.
