What’s the difference between a compelling, immersive short film and a throwaway piece of sub-viral crap? Not video resolution: nowadays, when every cat-filming schmoe has an HD video camera in his smartphone and the DSLR revolution has unleashed a tsunami of bokeh onto Vimeo.com, you need more than sharp pictures and good lenses to make an impact. According to Justin Jensen, an engineer-cum-amateur photographer/filmmaker who studied Computational Photography at the MIT Media Lab, “I realized that video quality is no longer limited by resolution, but instead by stabilization.”
In other words, you need smooth camera movement to give your vids that juicy sheen of production value. But since Jensen couldn’t afford a SteadiCam, he invented CineSkates: a tiny, inexpensive, portable, expandable camera-movement platform based on Joby’s Gorillapod.
CineSkates Camera Sliders from Cinetics on Vimeo.
