After buying Filmic last year, Bending Spoons has reportedly laid off all of the app maker’s staff, from top to bottom.
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Bending Spoons has reportedly laid off all of the staffbehind popular iOS and Android mobile filmmaking app Filmic Pro. That’s according to PetaPixel, which reported on Friday that it learned Filmic now has no dedicated employees and that the layoffs included the company’s founder and CEO, Neill Barham.
Some former high-level employees posted about their departure. Christopher Cohen, who was Filmic’s technical chief officer, posted on November 3rd that he was no longer with the company. Kevin Buonagurio, the company’s now-former chief operating officer, replied to a LinkedIn user who’d shared the PetaPixel story yesterday, saying that “pushing the envelope” of mobile filmmaking was part of “what made the Filmic journey so fulfilling for us.”
Filmic Pro enjoyed plenty of popularity among mobile filmmakers over the years, having been used to shoot movies and music videos. Apple even featured the Filmic DoubleTake dual-camera recording app prominently when it overhauled its camera approach for the iPhone 11 Pro phones. Filmic even announced FilmicFest 2023, its annual competitive mobile filmmaking festival, would return this year with a $25,000 grand prize, but that’s presumably canceled since the event signup page no longer exists.
Shortly after Bending Spoons bought Filmic in September last year, it debuted a subscription plan — it would now cost either $2.99 a week or $50 annually to use its features. That’s cheap for a professional app, but its previous one-time payment system made it much more accessible for independent filmmakers. Bending Spoons has made similar changes for Evernote, another company it bought last year before laying off most of its original staff over the summer.
Without its staff, Filmic Pro will probably move in-house at Bending Spoons, which is already involved in mobile video with its Splice video editing app, which it took over from GoPro in 2018. Maybe the company will even keep the Filmic Pro app around — but it probably won’t be the same app that made it so well-regarded in the first place.
