I don't know you. You don't know me. You don't know where I'm coming from and I say this kindly, and with compassion, and with an appreciation for where you are, where you think you are, what you know and what you think you know. So. With no animosity whatsoever, you have no idea what you're talking about.

It's fashionable to couch your matter-of-fact arguments in terms of "of course there's room for nuance" or "of course we can disagree about the details" but fundamentally, you're drawing parallels between markers and Panavision and because I don't know you, and because I bear you no ill will, I'm going to explain why you can't do that, why everyone who has ever told you you can can't do that, and why anyone ever making that argument also doesn't know what they're talking about.

I'm going to give FW Murnau an iPhone. Poof. Hand-crank limelight is a thing of the past, this dude's got ISO 3200 and sync sound in his pocket. It's definitely freeing - he's no longer loading 100ft mags of extremely finicky celluloid every time he wants 30 seconds of footage. He can see what he shot as he shot it and immediately after he can show the actors. But he can't get rid of the actors. And he can't get rid of the LD - we still need to make the light look cool. And he can't get rid of the grip - someone's gotta move the lights and arrange them between scenes and takes. And he can't get rid of makeup. And he can't get rid of wardrobe. And on any sort of semi-real production there are at least three or four other people filling in for the eight or nine jobs we aren't going to get into.

But let's say we're doing this Dogme95, cheap as we can, a nothing shoot as minimal as possible. It's FW and two actors. Are they all equally passionate? Are they all 100% on-board for love of the project? Who wrote the script? Do they all love it equally? If even one of them is doing this as a favor, that favor will have to be paid back at some point. If one of them is getting paid, the other one is getting paid or else that shit will go south about scene 3 of the day. Fundamentally, you can't make any sort of motion image with actors in it without collaboration.

Cinema/television is the greatest collaborative art the human race has ever come up with. Goofy-ass man-on-the-street shit requires a crew of three even if one of them holds the mic, one holds the camera and one chases after people to keep them out of frame or get releases off of them depending. Intervention required a crew of seven out in the field and that's just pointing cameras at dumbasses getting high. There are two actors in Cuaron's Gravity... and 42 people in the sound department alone. And the mistake amateurs and dreamers always make is assuming that somehow, the limiting factor is the gear.

Soderbergh runs a splinter crew. His productions are tiny. And because, for example, audio on an iPhone is pure shit, it took him a fifteen man crew to un-fuck the sound (not counting the four-man ADR casting department or the untold ADR actors). It took a seventeen man crew to do Soderbergh's Solaris. And tiny crew or no, they still wandered out with five PAs. Yeah you can do smaller movies. I've done smaller movies. But here's the thing:

Let's say you're making your passion piece. This is your dream. And you've rallied all your buddies; it's gonna be a think piece at a restaurant that requires nothing but a set and some conversation. You can do it with a smaller crew than Soderbergh used to shoot High Flying Bird. You can do it, get theatrical release, get a bunch of awards, and make your money back. And you can do it in fuckin' 1981 on 35mm.

Yeah. You can buy cheap markers or you can buy expensive markers. But if you're making movies you have a choice of making it worth it for everyone who believes in you, is counting on you, is your friend, puts up with you, is doing it for $125 a day, is doing it for their reel, is doing it because they have nothing better to do than play Smash Bros...

...or cheaping out on the one thing that might make it look good.

We cheaped out on our film back in 2003. But that meant we shot ends. We bought pieces of film that were less than a five hundred feet long and it still cost us a dollar a second before development and you know what? Crew was still hella more expensive. A thousand dollar a day camera package cost less than a $1500 a day lighting package or a $5k a day crew roster.

So are you all so disinterested that you're gonna shoot this thing on an iPhone? Okay, great. Go to. But if even one of you wants someone else to see this thing and like it, put some effort into it.

The project is worth it.