Thunder Bay's Cinevate has launched its first mass market consumer product.
The Morpheus stabilizer is a small lightweight hand-held device that attaches to personal smartphones and small point-and-shoot cameras to remove unwanted “shakes” while shooting photos or film.
“The idea for this goes back four years, it’s been a passion backbench project,” says Dennis Wood, president of Cinevate. “It is a consumer product, and we’ve never sold anything like it before.”
Cinevate, which got its start in Wood’s own basement, now occupies a 10,000-square-foot office, studio and warehouse space in a newly renovated building in the city's core. Since its start in 1994, the company has launched about 100 products, and injected between $1.5 million and $3 million into the local economy.
Cinevate, an award-winning film equipment company, is known for manufacturing high quality camera gear including things like sliders, motion control stabilizers and accessories mainly to professional filmmakers and photographers. The majority of their gear retails between $500 and $5,000, and is exported to photographers, filmmakers and production companies in Los Angeles and New York.
Wood says the Morpheus stabilizer product was in development during the recent smartphone boom and while the iPhone’s popularity was first skyrocketing.
“There was a change that happened when the iPhone became the most popular camera used for uploading photos to Flickr. It was very obvious that the iPhone would replace the point-and-shoot and it already has.”
Most significant is that the Morpheus product marks the company’s acknowledgment of the dramatic shift in the market with the popularity of smartphone photography. Simply put, more personal high-quality photography and videography is happening than ever before.
The Morpheus stabilizer will retail at $120 and fits on any smartphone or digital point-and-shoot, helping people simply take much better shots or video.
“What’s happened is the camera technology has caught up with this sort of technology,” said Wood. “So now you can actually take a $120 dollar device and couple that with your iPhone or smart phone and take some really great images. The cameras are amazing now.”
Made entirely of molded plastic with only a couple of micro-machined parts, the Morpheus stabilizer has articulating legs that adjust to create a level solid base for the camera or smartphone. For handheld shooting, it imitates the types of video shots that would normally require a slider, crane or dolly to create. Instead the product uses tiny magnets and specialized mounts that allow for similar horizontal, vertical and curved shots.
Milosz Skowronski is production and operations manager at Imaginarium, a Thunder Bay film studio. He attended the launch and says the Morpheus stabilizer will really improve people’s ability to use their smartphone cameras. “It’s intended for people to use to get really nice shots on a day-to-day basis and that’s pretty cool. It lets you do a lot. It’s a great way for people to take their cameras and small phones to the next level.”
Thunder Bay Mayor Keith Hobbs says it is another example of innovation happening in northwestern Ontario.
“It shows the innovative and creative spirit in Thunder Bay is alive and well. My son owns a photo studio and is just starting up, and he could use one of these so I’m going to buy him one… and I’m one of these shaky-hand people when I’m trying to use my cellphone to take pictures, so it’ll be perfect.”
The company invested about $150,000 in the product's development. Now it's out to raise money for the production of the stabilizer. They’ve launched a Kickstarter online public pledge campaign in an effort to raise $25,000 in seed funding. Wood said if the campaign is successful, the money would be used to cover one-third of the estimated $75,000 it will cost to have the product molded en masse for manufacturing.
www.kickstarter.com/projects/cinevate/morpheus-stabilizer-for-gopro-smartphone-and-small
