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MillimeterNative Camera
Jun 1, 2006 11:00 AM, By Cynthia Wisehart
I was pretty sure in 2002 that Jim Jannard would eventually try to build a camera. He collected them and used them himself; his company, Oakley, had an impressive production arsenal: an Arri SR3, an early F900 and the deck to go with it, a couple of nice Canon zooms, some Zeiss primes and an Angenieux zoom, some Beta SP and Digibeta gear, and a Smoke that they were trying to upgrade to HD. They had a big inhouse studio and a Moco rig. The video department — one full-time guy and a freelancer — produced a couple of corporate image videos a year with no budget to answer to; they traveled on the corporate jet and reported directly to Jannard.
All this went on in a big, modern cathedral that housed a pristine Oakley manufacturing center, a giant gymnasium, a lobby decorated with a full-size race car and some old aircraft jumpseats, and a beautiful raked theater for the primary purpose of showing the annual corporate video to the shareholders.
So Jannard is a person who has no trouble asserting his aesthetic, and he understands design and image. The corporate videos are put together with trips all over the world to film Oakley athletes risking their lives, and Jannard the photographer knows exactly how they should look. Four years ago, he also knew that shooting digital was the way to get it.
Time will tell if a shipping version of the camera comes into being. If it does, it will no doubt have beautiful industrial design. But it is worth noting — as D.W. Leitner elaborates in his NAB coverage on p. 45 — that there are a handful of American individuals with Jannard's same dream, and one or all of them may yet succeed in building a native (in the geographic sense of the word) digital camera.
For other NAB impressions, listen to our NAB podcasts at digitalcontentproducer.com/podcasts. We collected dozens of them live on the show floor at NAB. You can also read our blogs from NAB at blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/nab, or follow the link from our homepage.
To read about the adventures of Jannard's corporate video department, go to digitalcontentproducer.com/fieldprod/revfeat/video_big.
