Gonzo journalism has been a hip thing since the 1970s or so, a way of covering a story in a compelling format with more subjectivity and less objectivity. The style has since been applied to all sorts of media, including film—and indeed, the makers of the Gonzo Pi.
The Gonzo Pi is a camera with an open source design, yes, but it’s also a lot more than that. It’s intended to be an entire platform for film-making, all in the one housing. Camera-wise, the design combines a Raspberry Pi with the requisite first-party High Quality Camera, and warps it up in a 3D printed housing. You can build it up with a viewfinder and whatever old-school C-mount or 8 mm film lenses you can lay your hands on.
Beyond that, there’s an editing platform baked in to the device. It’s not unlike the tools in so many social media apps these days. The idea of the Gonzo Pi is that rather than shooting a whole ton of footage and takes and poring over them in great detail later, instead, you run and gun with the device and edit as you go. You can shoot retakes as you need, and even dub in more audio as necessary as you compose your film on the hoof. It’s intended to change the way you make films by virtue of its unique compositional paradigm.
We’ve featured some neat homebrew cameras before, to be sure, but none that quite put the edit suite right in the box.
[Thanks to Moritz for the tip!]
(1) The website is down :(
(2) The rest of the YT channel has some very surreal “ads” that are very much worth watching
Immediately reminds me of El Burro and his beautifully produced, tastefully photographed adult literature involving donkeys.
it seems like the point of the thing is the software, and from that perspective imo it should be a smartphone app instead of tied to hardware. i do like the idea of making a simpler video editing workflow but i’m not convinced this achieves much.
i was really impressed by the braindead idiom that vine used to simplify video editing. the gains from simplicity were huge, surprisingly without making it totally useless. one of the hardest parts when simplifying things is that you wind up defining what can be created. a lot of the gimmicks created by vine users were inspired specifically by the limitations of its interface.
but if you want to make something generally useful, allowing a wide range of workflows or artistic intents, then it seems inevitable that it becomes more complicated. so i only superficially understand it from looking at the documentation, but it seems like this is struggling in a middle world. where it’s not so simple that they’ve really accomplished something novel with the simplicity, yet not so powerful that people will accept its limitations and not want to work in post.
a very difficult struggle, for sure. i’m not sure what room there is for improvement. but i welcome this attempt even though i’ll never use or understand it because it isn’t an android app :)
An android app is the best possible app for an end user, for basically any kind of software, but also the hardest to make….
I hope the new Linux/Android crossover rumors fix that, if they do I’d be all for switching to 100% Android for nearly everything, mobile, laptop, maybe even server, it’s just so much more reliable than anything else I’ve ever used.
i have a lot of concerns about android, as an app developer. especially the way it continuously drifts, with zillions of difficult updates forced upon us.
but it’s also decently well designed in a lot of ways. dealing with its video interface isn’t really any more difficult than v4l, and its user input and display functionality is pretty easy to work with too, and very flexible. its “NDK” native C code / JNI interface is pretty usable for bringing in existing libraries like libjpeg or whatever.
i’d say it’s about middle of the road as far as how hard it is to develop for these days. specifically it’s much more powerful, much easier to use, and much less drift than competing linux-plus-layers like whatever Maemo is called these days. really just throwing “Linux” at it doesn’t resolve any of these tough questions like how to share display / input / audio / video interfaces, and every linux user environment winds up with different and changing approaches. and android is just one of those, not really all that different from the others.
if you want to write retargetable code, it definitely doesn’t tie you down too badly.
I don’t do much documentary filmmaking, and I’d have some questions about the ergonomics if I did.
But! I truly love how this is conceived and pitched, as a consumer product for a target market of one. If every ad that people tried to force upon me was like this, it would truly be a new Eden.
Website for the project: https://gonzopi.org/