After seeing RED’s new Youtube videos touting “RED TECH | ARSENAL '' posted the day after Jan 6, I couldn’t stop thinking about how so much of RED’s branding throughout the years has always alluded to weaponry and how it plays right into America’s culture of violence. I don’t know about anyone else, but especially after the events last week here in the US, I’m pretty tired of seeing the glorification of guns and war overall, but I’m especially discouraged to keep seeing it featured so prominently by RED in our community of filmmaking.
Don’t get me wrong, I love RED cameras. I own a Gemini and have shot on many other models all the way back to the RED One. I’m specifically talking about the marketing here as a RED owner and cinematographer based in the US. I’m talking about the framing of these cameras as if they’re military assault rifles, branding them as Weapons, putting skulls on them, calling them Rangers, and using words like Arsenal and Magazine as if swapping out hard drives is akin to loading ammunition.
If you live in the US, you see this kind of toxic masculinity of glorifying violence everywhere. It’s an unfortunate part of our culture and you can draw a straight line between decades of marketing to make Americans, men specifically, feel weak without a gun in their hand to the domestic terrorism we’re seeing now. What I’m asking here is why RED continues to be a part of selling the juvenile fantasy of war when we’ve seen now for years where it leads? They’re great cameras for professional filmmakers, not guns for wannabe soldiers. Why keep branding them as such?
You don’t see RED’s competitors in Germany or Japan using that kind of language and marketing. Maybe that’s because a few generations ago, both countries witnessed the results of radicalized genocidal movements and since then, have worked to move away from normalizing violence in the exact way America has been moving towards it. Filmmaking should be used to inspire and create, why so much emphasis on destruction and killing?
So as a dedicated RED customer, I want to see a move away from the militant imagery in their marketing. They’re already halfway there. Komodo, Dragon, Gemini, Helium, these are all great names that embody creativity and adventure. You can invoke a sense of toughness with something like Monstro instead of referencing a literal weapon that has taken countless lives. But even these examples are then wrapped up in marketing language as 'arsenals' and branded with the Weapon skull logo.
I personally don’t want to be reminded every time I pull out my camera of death, assault rifles, and the white supremacist domestic terrorism that glorifies them. We’re not soldiers in a war shooting and killing people, but creators filming and capturing stories to entertain, grow, and inspire a better future. I would like my tools for doing so to reflect that aspiration.
Cinema Camera marketing might seem small to you, but every little thing adds up. Us Americans need to start taking responsibility to get this country on a better path whether that’s RED rethinking their marketing culture or filmmakers analyzing what we’re saying in the stories we tell.
Shit got real this week.
Originally Posted by Karim D. Ghantous
