Is Sony's ‘Mastery in the Making’ FX30 promo playing entirely fair?

Sony’s stunning ‘Mastery in the Making’ promo for its new FX30 camera has drawn some criticism for using upscale production and cost to showcase the qualities of an avowedly indie camera. Phil Rhodes examines the arguments.

It’s not uncommon for camera companies to release some nice material to promote a new device, and Sony’s launch piece for the FX30, called Mastery in the Making, is a particularly pretty example. The behind-the-scenes material shows a rather upscale production in progress, with cranes, multi-axis stabilisers, huge lights (including Litegear’s inordinately large and spectacular colour-mixing Auroris cluster) and someone billed as one of the best swordfighters in the world.

It’s beautiful. The problem is that setups like those tend to make cameras look good. After all, practically every camera on the market, right down to the lowest-end options available that come up used on eBay, have much more performance than – say – a Viper from the early 2000s. The Viper was used for some spectacularly gorgeous productions, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Zodiac. The clue, though, is in that sentence: they’re gorgeous productions, and YouTube commentators have been quick to point out that the FX30 is not really positioned to be deployed on productions that gorgeous.

This is a complaint familiar to anyone who’s been involved in material aimed at what might be politely termed the introductory level part of film and TV. Apply any tool above the filmmaking equivalent of amateur dramatics, and viewers complain that the process is relying too much on toys. The other way to look at it is that yes, cameras just like the FX30 can absolutely help people claw cinema-level results out of minimal resources, and there are absolutely ways to achieve things for pocket money. Still, if someone were to suggest that Sony were not marrying its indie camera with an indie production, well, that’d be a pretty fair comment.

The name’s Macgregor

The cinematographer on Mastery in the Making is someone whose genesis was certainly in the less generously funded region of filmmaking. He’s one of those people who goes by a single name: Macgregor made a name for himself more than sixteen years ago with the short Similo, shot for a song on a then-cutting-edge DVX100 using – according to some sources – the Cinemek groundglass adaptor. Despite the privations of a standard-definition camera and a quality-sapping optical relay setup, Similo looked so much like a real movie that it had many enthusiastic young hopefuls practically licking the screen in a desperate attempt to infect themselves with a morsel of whatever the glorious creator had. Phrases like “epoch-making” are overused, but Similo was one of the earliest demonstrations of a fact that had clearly been true for a while, but which was rarely shown in practice: that the capability of affordable filmmaking equipment had risen to meet audience expectations.

And that was 2006. A modern cellphone would be embarrassed to produce the sort of images that were state of the art then. Even without having ever touched an FX30, it’s a fairly safe assumption it eclipses not only the DVX100, but also the very highest-end cinematography options of 2006, by light years. The thing is, that’s not the biggest real difference between Similo and Mastery. The most visible difference between is that the former was shot guerilla-style, on a shoestring, and the latter, well, not so much.

Accessible content

There’s a level at which that’s a bit of a pity, because the only part of Mastery in the Making that’s arguably inaccessible to independent filmmakers is all the swordfighting, if only from a safety and insurance point of view. Given all of the death-defying parkour videos out there, which are at least as risky, there’s some argument that even that could be cooked up by people working in their free time, though it’s hard to actually recommend that anyone without the relevant experience should practice barely missing someone else with a piece of sharp metal just to satisfy the audience’s lust for action. It was also shot at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, which is probably not the least expensive location in the world, and which, in that city, in that state, in that country, probably requires some of the most expensive insurance going.

Part of the moral of this story is not to shoot in LA, no matter how nice it is to be a real, actual Hollywood moviemaker, but the rest of it is fairly achievable. The swordmaking sequence is a matter of persuading a blacksmith to allow workshop access (and to work much more in the dark than is probably normal now, or even was normal in what looks to be the medieval far east). The beach scene is a matter of waiting for the weather and the time of day; nobody, not even on the very largest productions, is capable of lighting the ocean out to the horizon. People have used lighting drones for a suitably backlit night look over the water, but waiting for magic hour is a lot, lot cheaper, and at least some of it looks to have been shot on a small gimbal.

The FX30 is perhaps most often compared to Blackmagic’s pocket series, although it’s also something of a competitor to things like a Canon C70, the smaller Reds, or many higher-end, video-capable stills cameras. These are not generally the sort of camera which will be used on productions which put $25k lights on cherry pickers. The company itself refers to the FX30 as “for future filmmakers”. Possibly that will change, as the huge capability of modest cameras begins to exceed the requirements of even quite ambitious productions, and crews begin to realise the benefits of small, light, low-power-consumption gear. 

In the meantime, though, let’s recognise that this peak of capability is, in the end, a good thing. The LA Arboretum is beautiful, but the lion’s share of the work there is being done by the use of mist and fog, the warm light in the paper lanterns, and the oh-so-modern choice of teal backlight, all of which can absolutely be done on the sort of budget that a FX30 might be more likely to encounter in the wild.

Here it is below.