I was driving around hunting arrowheads with my dad and brother, and listened to a Dan Carlin podcast on pain and suffering. He talked about how human beings are willing spectators in public executions, even clamoring for an unimpeded view of torture. Even today, people watch through glass as inmates are given lethal injection drugs. What's wrong with us?

A week earlier I was in the National Portrait Gallery, looking at an old lithograph of PT Barnum. It blew my mind that Barnum was smart enough to realize human beings will gather to view literally anything, so long as it was interesting and marketed in such a way to pique our innate curiosities. As human beings we have a thirst for knowledge, and the unexpected serves as another color to paint our vivid realities. At the very least it gives us something to talk about. 

Carlin goes on to talk about how the Romans gathered in the Coliseum to watch men battle lions, lions battle bears, and a thousand other violent matchups presented in the guise of sport and entertainment. With the entire world at our fingertips, what will continue to compel us to gather in crowds as observers? Is there any future for real shared experience, or are we replacing it entirely with an internet based groupthink? 

Think about the cost of sporting events. The Roman Coliseum was an epicenter of plebeian entertainment.  There was a time when almost anyone could afford to take in a game, now you'd be pressed to find parking for less than $25. A handful players make almost $1m a week, all at the cost of the spectator. ESPN likes to use these huge contract signings as headlines, but they truly are a giant middle finger to the fans. Try to find a seat in an NBA arena for less than $100 that provides even half as good a view of the court as TV. That being said, an entire game without the steady mindless chatter of announcing might be worth the cost of admission. 

MoviePass is almost dead, but theater chains are still hanging on, mostly by operating more like restaurants ($$$hello beer money$$$). But we've hit peak-stupid in moviemaking, swinging from one franchise to the next trying to manufacture hits and recapture the blockbusting magic of the 1980s. You may disagree with this, but we don't need any more Jurassic Park movies. Hollywood is dredging up nostalgia in an attempt to fill seats, but the movies themselves are secondary to the marketing. It stands to reason to think that theaters will likely go the way of bookstores in my lifetime. I can get a 70" 4K tv right now for the cost of seeing 5 movies in the theater, all of which are sequels. (This is completely inevitable, right???)

Live music is the last holdout. The recording industry was completely gutted by piracy, and the streaming services don't offer near the same financial benefits that album sales once did. Artists now need to hit the road more than ever to make ends meet. But the music itself, is increasingly pre-recorded. In Vegas, superstar DJs are the new Wayne-Newtonian attraction to get foot traffic in the casino. So we still show up for concerts, there's just less Marshall stacks and more Macbooks on stage.

We get on the internet to feel social connection, and we are social creatures, I am hopeful that we won't become too distracted to gather and partake in the spectacle, PT Barnum would agree.

There are countless "pocket cinema" cameras on the market, but its near impossible to beat the camera you have with you at all times. Here's a thought exercise: decouple your mind from the notion that what is in your pocket is a sophisticated phone that has other features. Replace the thought with "I have a futuristic camera that can order lunch". See how easy that was? The engineers who design smartphones (now i'm hesitating to even use the word phone here) spend a great deal of time improving the camera and display, whereas the telecom technology in your devices has stayed relatively the same.

There's something inherently gimmicky about a feature length film shot entirely on a phone. The act of shooting on consumer technology should be a means to speed up process. Faster setups, smaller rigs, time is money etc. If the plan is to shoot a long form narrative project one must consider battery life, lens options, and audio input limitations. Despite those limitations, maybe you should still shoot your movie on a "phone". Here's why.

It looks nice.

There's a unique quality to the image itself. It's sharp where it needs to be, and in the right lighting environment it really does look velvety. You can achieve decent background separation just by moving a bit closer to the subject. The minimum focusing distance makes it possible to get incredibly tight shots, and much more quickly than with a conventional video/film set up.

Low light performance? Nope! Your image is going to get mega grainy in low light. The sensor is tiny. The noise almost looks like film grain, especially so in B&W. Luckily you've spent $0 renting a camera rig, so you can splurge on lighting. You will need it.

It's flexible.

Getting macro shots and b-roll in tight spaces (inside the refrigerator, overhead, car scenes) is a breeze. The camera is so small you can really get it anywhere it needs to be. Most of the better capture apps like Filmic and ProMovie have built in stabilization, so a grip/rig isn't necessary. Or you can go crazy on accessories! Gimbals, filters, anamorphic adapters will all add to your production value, while costing much (muuuuch) less than their professional counterparts. 

Workflow, bro.

I would venture to say that even the worst smartphone interface is still superior to the best production camera firmware. You can begin auditioning clips before you ever sit down behind an editing station, quickly flagging the best clips to import. When I work on a 5k iMac, the machine regularly slows down when scrubbing through 4k footage. Not so on my smartphone.

It's good enough.

The resolution exceeds expectations, and the files hold up decently to color correction. Having a fixed lens initially first feels like a limitation, but the ability to toggle between wide and telephoto lenses on the camera covers a decent range of shooting scenarios. Why fight it?

(update: I'm trying to transfer a 35gb clip over airdrop. Maybe not recommended for long interviews)

By now, you're firmly in camp Yanny or Laurel, your marriage is in shambles, and up is down. This latest viral illusion was of the auditory variety, thus sparing you from a long angry diatribe about white balance and monitor calibration. I'll admit that I first heard Yanny and it immediately shifted to Laurel, mostly ruining the experience.

If you've spent any time mixing or mastering music, you know to aim for a solid middle-ground mix that sounds good on most stereos. This means making concessions that make the mix sound objectively worse on expensive audiophile level gear, but better overall across more accessible equipment. Certain mix combinations bury instruments or vocals entirely because of how the audio is processed and the speakers' frequency response.

Mass-produced speakers cannot replicate every single audible frequency, particularly the tiny ones in your smartphone. These smaller speakers generally sound more shrill as there isn't enough volume to produce audible low frequencies.

The Y/L illusion results from stripping the lower frequencies from the word Laurel leaving us with something that sounds completely different. The recording is consistent with other online English language pronunciation guide videos. As Yanny isn't a word, it seems pretty clear that this illusion is merely coincidental and isn't two distinct superimposed recordings.

Another possible explanation is the compression of the audio via however you are hearing it (twitter/youtube etc). Slower connections results in the quality dropping automatically to avoid buffering, and this compression mostly removes the lowest frequencies. Just as the tiny speakers cant replicate low frequencies, the compression can also strip out the low end, leaving us again to hear Yanny. 

Lastly, the most fun theory can be extrapolated as survival instinct. It becomes impossible for me to hear Yanny after I have deduced that the voice is in fact saying Laurel. My brain will fill in the gaps (the low notes) from memory. Even if I lose the low end, or listen through a lil' tiny speaker on a sloooow connection, I will still hear Laurel. Try as I might, I can no longer hear Yanny. This phenomenon utilizes the same part of our brain which helps us sync up what we hear and what we see, as this information arrives in our brain at completely different times (speed of light vs speed of sound). This skill keeps us evolved humans from feeling perpetually disoriented. All of this is good because if Yanny is anything like Yanni I don't want to hear it anyway.

I woke up to the news of a firmware update, enabling a bunch of new features on my camera. Most notably, a log mode. Log mode essentially strips out a lot of artificially added contrast and color in order to preserve highlight details and increase the overall dynamic range in the image. I got to immediately put it to use on some interview footage today, and it performed admirably! 

A few things I've discovered about shooting in LOG:

1. It's not the easiest path. Without an external monitor with LUT overlays it becomes tough to understand where your image could wind up in post. Proper exposure is critical, as over/under exposed + desaturated color is a recipe for an ugly final product. 
    
2. It takes time. There's no quick and dirty when you've pre-committed to coloring each and every scene.
    
3. It plays nice. The footage becomes easier to blend with different cameras as they can all be graded to match.
    
4. It needs bits. Low bitrate video doesn't take color correction very well, so pay attention to your codec.

As there are hundreds of articles about color correction, I want to talk instead about firmware and support. I have reached a point as a consumer that I'm skeptical about anything that relies on connecting to your iPhone. The most profitable company in the world stops supporting their products after just 5 years, and there are pieces of production gear that can last seemingly forever. We used to joke that the C-stands and Mole fresnels they rented us in school were used to shoot SPARTACUS. I'm hesitant to believe small hardware manufacturers are up to the herculean task of performing regular security updates until the end of time. What could go wrong, right?