Filmic’s Entire Staff Laid Off by Parent Company Bending Spoons

Jaron Schneider, reporting for PetaPixel:

Filmic, or FiLMiC as written by the brand, no longer has any dedicated staff as parent company Bending Spoons has laid off the entire team including the company’s founder and CEO, PetaPixel has learned. Considered for years as the best video capture application for mobile devices, the team behind Filmic Pro and presumably Filmic Firstlight — the company’s photo-focused app — has been let go. [...]

It is unclear what Bending Spoons intends to do with Filmic Pro or Filmic Firstlight, but there were early signs of trouble when the company’s most recent major update was last year. The most recent notable update to Filmic Pro came in October which brought support for Apple Log into the app, but there was no mention of the addition of external SSD support, odd considering that Filmic Pro had a strong track record for updating its platform to work with all of the new iPhone updates — especially those that are particularly important for video.

In Filmic’s absence, Blackmagic Design’s iOS app has become the most popular way to capture footage with the new iPhones and was used by Apple’s in-house team for the production of its Mac event on October 31.

Christina Warren, on Threads:

Hate this but I’m sadly not at all surprised. Filmic has an incredible product they were afraid to charge for and when they finally changed pricing models, it was too little too late and users rebelled. If they had been charging $100 a year or even upfront in 2015, I think they could have survived without selling to the Bending Spoons vultures. But now they’ve got a subscription app that isn’t actively improving and free competition from Black Magic who uses their apps as loss leaders. Hate it.

Filmic was featured by Apple in numerous iPhone keynotes and App Store promotions over the years — for a long stretch it was undeniably the premier “pro” video camera app for iPhones.

★ Tuesday, 5 December 2023