Cinevate Founder Dennis Wood Leaving Company
Updated 08-01-2018
In response to the post below, Tyler Bragnalo had the following commentary to add:
The team here at Cinevate all have mixed feelings about Dennis’s departure. While we are happy to see him pursue his other interests, he will be missed.
He and I have been working so closely together on Cinevate R&D over the past 10 years that neither of us can envision a scenario where he is no longer involved in new product development. He will happily be pulled back in for regular whiteboard sessions.
In a video shared today, Cinevate founder and CEO Dennis Wood has announced he’s moving on from the company. Replacing him is Tyler Bragnalo.
Thankfully Cinevate is not going anywhere, and in the video they say the company is becoming leaner and smarter. They’re merging their manufacturing and supply sides, so they can more quickly move from design to manufacturing new products.
How will they do that? We’re not entirely sure, but based on this article from a few years back, it appears that Tyler has the heavy machinery and manufacturing experience, but until now he’s been operating as a vendor. Now that he’ll be taking over Cinevate’s operations, overall manufacturing costs and time will be reduced. That’s just our guess though.
Using the Cinevate Duzi 4 in subzero temperatures
Cinevate is a Canadian company that has been producing a lot of solid gear for video shooters. Their original Duzi slider was the most portable slider of its time, and it jump started our whole documentary-kit-in-a-backpack phase. We traveled around Alaska for a couple years with an entire filmmaking kit in one backpack, with the Duzi slider attached to the outside.
More recently, the Cinevate Duzi 4 Slider has a unique flywheel that makes it the smoothest portable slider we’ve ever used. It really is the best slider out there in its price point, well at least in our opinion. Here’s our Duzi 4 review on Newsshooter, as well as our test of Cinevate’s Grip Reacher. Since then, they’ve brought on Modo-Drive, a motion control accessory for the Duzi 4, which looks a lot simpler than many of the electronic motion control systems out there today.
Using the Cinevate Universal Accessory Mount to make a compact Canon C200 rig
The quality and durability of Cinevate’s equipment is what makes it special, so maybe an even heavier push into manufacturing will give them more reach with their products. For example, the Cinevate Universal Accessory Mount should be an essential part of any filmmaking kit – we have a number of them and they’ve held up without fail for years.
It would be great to see Cinevate appear at tradeshows like NAB, to showcase their products to a more global audience. Maybe that’s part of their new plan, who knows? But we hope this new era for Cinevate means we see more of them in the future, not less.