Bradley Olsen

You’ll never believe where I’ve just been! I recently returned from a possible future reality where I was visiting a movie set. The crew was so awesome and showed me so many phenomenal things. I can’t talk about the movie itself because they don’t want anybody to steal the idea before they get a chance to make it. But I can tell you about their workflow and the technology they were implementing. Okay, lets start with the camera. Man, that thing was amazing! It didn’t really look like a typical camera you’d see today, more like a giant eyeball on a gimbal. They rigged it all sorts of ways and controlled it with a tablet. And when I say controlled it, I mean pretty much every aspect you could think of. You see it’s a light field camera so it captures everything in front of it with depth. Through an app you can control things like focus, focal length, exposure, and frame rate. What was even crazier is that none of that was baked into the actual raw files! It was all settings passed o...

In the 21st century everybody has the means to make a movie. You no longer need a lot of money or connections to Hollywood to get going on your first project. Got an idea and a smart phone? Great, go out and tell your story! Of course that doesn’t mean your movie will automatically be an Academy Award Winning Blockbuster and make over a billion dollars. It’s a little more complicated than just that. But on a fundamental level, whether you are shooting a video of your kid playing in a pool or a scene with Tom Cruise running through the streets of Paris, the basic principles are the same. Light reflects off of objects, gets captured by a camera, and moving images are produced. The power now found in ordinary people’s hands cannot be overstated. We no longer live in an era of trade secrets only shared to the initiated. The curtain has been pulled back and we see the Wizard of Oz for who he really is. Very technical processes have been demystified and simplified to the point that a c...