I have always written, I have always loved writing. I started while studying languages in high school, creating a school newspaper covering current events and school life. I then continued at university, where I began studying film, creating a magazine on CD with a friend of mine, distributed for free. Inside it there were articles and a video section featuring short films by my fellow university students. It was 2002-2003 and it was our way of climbing over the wall the industry used to shut out underground cinema. In those years the industry was still a lumbering giant. The chances that an independent short would be seen by anyone were extremely low, hence the need to distribute my colleagues’ shorts through the magazine.
There was independent cinema, but the self-produced kind couldn’t find a foothold in the commercial and production world: a simple semi-professional camera cost more than a student could easily afford. And it wasn’t just the camera you had to buy, but also the computer, the video capture cards, editing programs. At the end of the day, if you got by with the equivalent of €30,000 you had spent little and had equipment that today would be below amateur level! We’re talking about cameras and computers that today would be outclassed by the power and quality of any mid-range smartphone but that back then were the best you could aspire to if you wanted to start out as a director or a cinematographer.
The cameras were bulky, slow (usually equivalent to ISO 250-320), and among the affordable ones only one model had interchangeable lenses (the legendary XL-1). The internet was still in its “first age”, and to find information on how a film was made, a camera effect, a particular shot, you had to resort to industry magazines. There were no tutorials, there was no YouTube. I always tried, with my friends, to create shorts and videos inspired by the great directors who made us fall in love with cinema through their works. It almost never went well, the technical resources were limited and there was also a limit to the accessibility of professional gear. Prosumer cameras had tiny sensors, poor integrated lenses and were incapable of delivering selective focus, the first true and obvious distinction between an amateur shot and an at least semi-professional one.
In my city, Rome, only one rental house rented out lights and stands for low-budget or self-produced shorts. It was a tiny rental house, in a basement, and it had pieces that were older than my grandfather. The big rental houses rented only to the production companies of the film establishment. So all that was left for us was to gain experience with post-war equipment and use our imagination.
Then in 2006 something happened to me that marked my entire career. Nokia, to promote the N93 —one of the first phones capable of recording long videos with 3x optical zoom and Zeiss lenses— held a contest. It selected 60 film students and sent them the phone before it came out on the market. Each student had to shoot a short with the N93 and then send it to the jury. The best one would be distributed and screened in Italian cinemas alongside Michel Gondry’s film “The Science of Sleep”! To think you could place images shot with a phone next to an international film in a cinema was pure science fiction, but that contest made it possible to open cinemas to alien technologies. I was among the lucky 60 students, I received the phone and shot my short. It had all the flaws and limitations of the cameras we had grown up with but it did something incredible: it made us imagine a near future in which cameras would shrink in size and become more accessible. If a phone could have the same recording capability as a consumer camera but in a tenth of the space, what would we see in the future? I made it to the finals but I didn’t win the contest; however, one thing stuck with me that would later guide the career as a cinematographer I was about to begin: technology was changing the way films were made and was easing access to that world which seemed distant and hard to reach. Something was moving.
In those same years the first Arri digital cine cameras arrived and above all the first Red One. It weighed as much as a tank, but the sharp divide that had existed before between amateur and professional equipment was beginning to blur. The rental houses began opening up to small production entities: small companies, even cultural associations. This allowed many of my generation to gain experience with the same gear the film industry used.
At the same time, on the Italian market, P+S Technik took hold. The first adapter capable of mounting photographic lenses in front of the optics of prosumer cameras. It was a true revolution. It had been invented about a decade earlier in Germany but in Italy it was made famous by the master of cinema Tinto Brass. As luck would have it, I interviewed Tinto Brass himself in 2004 for a film series I wanted to run at my film club Detour, and that conversation gave me a deep respect for his art and for him as a person, which led me to follow all his statements and public appearances.
The cameras we had always used as a fallback due to the inaccessibility of proper cine cameras acquired a new dignity through this adapter. We finally had selective focus and the ability to mount wide-angle lenses that didn’t render scenes as if they were seen through the bottom of a bottle. I was fascinated by P+S Technik.
Exhibitors and above all the audience had realised that small independent films and shorts could work in cinemas.
When in 2006 I began taking my first steps as a cinematographer, I was shooting shorts produced by small companies and P+S Technik was the highest benchmark I could aspire to. In the meantime the internet had also evolved, there was YouTube, the first online videos, the forums.
Thanks to them I gathered enough information to build my first homemade 35mm adapter. In the following years I kept improving it, I refined the internal lenses, the ground glass and its movement until I had a stable and reliable adapter: my Ojo35 was ready for field validation. Enough with tests devoid of artistic value and packed with nothing but data: now it had to hold up under real work. The time had come for my creation to make the leap.
The opportunity was an independent film with a very small budget in which a friend of mine was doing the cinematography and, consciously or unconsciously, trusted my Ojo35 enough to shoot the whole film with it. I was the camera operator on that feature. My most precious adapter, even though excellent from an optical standpoint, left much to be desired both in appearance and in maintenance. It needed constant care.
After the film I used it for many music videos paired with a Panasonic HVX200 (finally a camera capable of recording in 4:2:2) until, at the rental house where I rented lights and camera accessories, word of my adapter reached the then-owner. The rental house was Technovision, the owner is named Arald. He is the same person who collaborated with Henryk Chroscicki and who then took up his legacy.
He asked me to tell him how I had built it, what lenses I had used inside and how I had managed to make it almost 2/3 of a stop brighter than the P+S Technik. He was very cordial and proposed that I collaborate to improve it within Technovision. After that chat he confided in me that he had also collaborated on the P+S Technik project. But the thrill was short-lived. Canon put the 5D Mark II on the market, among the first DSLRs capable of shooting video. The dawn of the digital revolution, with everything that would follow from it.
Had I not experienced firsthand all those upheavals in the industry, I probably wouldn’t have the perspective that to this day still fuels my interest in new technologies and in streamlining the film industry’s workflow. Exactly 20 years after receiving that Nokia, the epiphany I had while holding it in my hand still hasn’t worn off. Since 2024 it has found a home in Pongo Studio and an outlet in the applications we are developing and testing.