Notes from Austin
SXSW loses its center and finds itself, Apple absorbs Final Cut’s best plug-in maker, and the first woman to win Best Cinematography in 96 years.
Hi everyone!
Will you be at NAB this year?
We will. Our booth is North Hall N1672 (add to your NAB show planner here).
Let’s meet. Submit this form and we will update you as the date gets closer.
(We’re brewing something cool. Stay tuned.)
—Shamir
This week:
The Oscars made history in more ways than one, a VFX studio you’ve never heard of has been behind every Marvel film for a decade, Adobe’s CEO announced an NVIDIA partnership and an exit in the same week and I went to my first SXSW.
Render Reel
Autumn Durald Arkapaw became first woman to win Best Cinematography in 96 years of the Academy: shooting on 100-pound IMAX cameras, 65mm film stock, and Ultra Panavision lenses to make Sinners the top-grossing original film of the decade.
A Redditor built the best Oscars recap we’ve seen: a visual breakdown of every winner, speech, and record from the night, from PTA’s three-win sweep to the first woman to win Best Cinematography in 96 years. Scroll through the whole ceremony below.
Exceptional Minds is a nonprofit VFX studio staffed entirely by autistic adults and they’ve worked on every Marvel film since 2015, erased a camera crew from Gladiator II, and painted fall colors onto trees for Bridgerton.
An SMU professor has spent 30 years hunting down “four-wall” screenings: Films so obscure they rent out entire theaters for a week and nobody shows up. He was one of four people who paid to see the lowest-grossing film of all time ($30 total box office). Now that Dallas has been added as an Oscar-qualifying city, he might be living in the golden age of his own very specific obsession.
SXSW dispatch
Austin is interesting.
One day it was 90°F and I was nearly sunburnt by 2pm. The next it was 40 and I was buying a hoodie from a merch table because I packed like an idiot. Nobody warns you about this.
This was SXSW’s first year without the Austin Convention Center, which is being demolished and won’t reopen until 2029. So the festival spilled across the entire city; panels in hotels, screenings scattered across downtown, Congress Avenue shut down and turned into one long block party of activations and dirt-mound Rivian test drives.
In practice, it meant you were always 20 minutes from wherever you needed to be and whatever you wanted to see was already at capacity by the time you arrived.
But the serendipity is really real and that’s the thing nobody can replicate about this festival.
I had a conversation about distribution models with a VC at a taco stand, watched a filmmaker pitch a series to a streamer exec at a hotel bar, and ended up at a ranch party that felt more Cannes villa than Austin indie fest. The Texas version of the Riviera house party is just bigger, dustier, and has better brisket.
What makes SXSW structurally different from every other festival is that collision. At Cannes, you’re surrounded by film people. At CES, you’re surrounded by tech.
At SXSW, a fintech founder, a horror director, touring musician, and an AI startup CEO are all in the same bar at the same time, and somehow it all makes sense.
This was also the first time I attended a major festival with a project. I co-executive produced PERFECT, starring Julia Fox and directed by Millicent Hailes in her feature debut. I’ve been to festivals before on vibes alone but having something to actually talk about changes the experience completely.
….
SXSW filmmakers shot this year’s festival on everything from two ARRI ALEXA 35s to a refurbished Sony 9000 bought on eBay with tapes that haven’t been in production for two decades.
Apple acquires MotionVFX: The Warsaw-based company has been building professional-grade tools for Apple’s ecosystem and beyond for 15 years but now it’s just Apple. Likely gets folded into Creator Studio, the $13/month subscription bundle Apple launched in January.
Adobe and NVIDIA announce strategic partnership which means Firefly’s next generation of models will be built on NVIDIA’s computing stack, Premiere Pro and Frame.io get CUDA acceleration, and Adobe is launching cloud-native 3D digital twins for marketing.
Adobe’s CEO of 18 years steps down. Shantanu Narayen oversaw the company’s transformation from boxed software to cloud subscriptions to AI. He’ll stay on as board chair while they search for a successor. The timing is notable: he announced the NVIDIA partnership, then the exit, in the same week.
This week we’re watching:
New Studiobinder video essay on why the most powerful thing a camera can do is nothing at all. It breaks down how filmmakers from Ozu to Glazer use locked-off shots to make composition and editing do the work that camera movement usually handles.
Worth 11 minutes if you’ve ever defaulted to a dolly move when the scene didn’t need one.
Retail Therapy: The $35 Bluetooth Tracker
The Pebblebee Evercolor is a Bluetooth tracker that clips to your keys and screams at you with sound and light when you lose them.
Works with both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub, which means it’s the Switzerland of trackers for households where one person is iPhone and the other is Android and neither is switching.
500-foot Bluetooth range, 12-month rechargeable battery, and a “Link recovery” feature that helps strangers return your stuff. Check it out at pebblebee.com.