Filmic, or FiLMiC as written by the brand, no longer has any dedicated staff as parent company Bending Spoons has laid off the entire team including the company’s founder and CEO, PetaPixel has learned.
Considered for years as the best video capture application for mobile devices, the team behind Filmic Pro and presumably Filmic Firstlight — the company’s photo-focused app — has been let go. Rumors arose last month that Bending Spoons performed a round of layoffs that affected the operations, maintenance, and development and brought those functions in-house. The layoffs were confirmed to PetaPixel by sources close to the matter who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the brand.
Filmic’s founder and CEO Neill Barham’s LinkedIn shows that he concluded his time at the company in November, highlighting that the mass layoffs affected everyone at the company from top to bottom.
Bending Spoons is an Italy-based app developer that was founded in 2013 and is best known for its Splice and Remini apps. Splice is a mobile video editor while Remini is a photo-enhancing app that also integrates generative AI. The company acquired Filmic in September 2022 in what was framed as a move designed to provide much-needed support to further build out the company’s capture apps, which made sense given Bending Spoons’s focus on post-production.
“Bending Spoons brings to FiLMiC its legacy of building cutting-edge mobile technologies and brands, providing a backbone of technological expertise and digital marketing innovation,” Filmic said at the time.
“The support of Bending Spoons will help fuel our plans for growth, accelerate our development cycles, and ultimately build an even stronger, more valuable FiLMiC experience for our customers in the ever-expanding Creator Community.”
Just a year later, Bending Spoons has gutted the team. No mention of Filmic or its apps is found on the company’s website at the time of publication.
It is unclear what Bending Spoons intends to do with Filmic Pro or Filmic Firstlight, but there were early signs of trouble when the company’s most recent major update was last year. The most recent notable update to Filmic Pro came in October which brought support for Apple Log into the app, but there was no mention of the addition of external SSD support, odd considering that Filmic Pro had a strong track record for updating its platform to work with all of the new iPhone updates — especially those that are particularly important for video.
In Filmic’s absence, Blackmagic Design’s iOS app has become the most popular way to capture footage with the new iPhones and was used by Apple’s in-house team for the production of its Mac event on October 31.
Bending Spoons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.