Status: planning & bench prototyping — follow the build
The same move. Every take.
OpenMotionFX is an open-source, modular motion control system for smartphone filmmaking and VFX. Motorized camera moves you can replay exactly — the trick behind clean plates, crowd duplication and impossible transitions — for under ~$400 in parts instead of $68,000.
One trick unlocks a whole visual language
Repeatable camera motion — the ability to run the exact same move twice — is the foundation of multi-pass VFX.
Shoot a pass with your actor, run the identical move on the empty set, and the two takes composite perfectly: your actor can now vanish mid-shot, play their own twin, or walk through a crowd made of six people filmed six times. Because the camera path is data, not muscle memory, every pass lines up sub-pixel.
Until now that ability started at professional robot arms. Consumer sliders can't repeat a move; prosumer gear locks repeatability behind apps and subscriptions.
multi-pass playbook
clean plates remove rigs & crew
crowd duplication 6 people → 60
twinning one actor, two roles
scale tricks giants & miniatures
seamless wipes impossible transitions
day-for-night two lighting passes
product spins identical every time
Between $200 and $68,000 there is nothing
Where repeatable, multi-axis motion control actually starts today.
Nothing in between — and nothing at all built smartphone-first. That's the gap this project exists to close.
Wi-Fi jitter can't ruin a take
Moves are compiled on your laptop and pre-loaded into every module. A single broadcast GO signal — synchronized to within a tenth of a millisecond — starts them all. The network never carries real-time motion, so each module executes its move on precise local timing, every single time.
Compile
The Conductor app on your laptop turns your keyframes into exact per-motor trajectories — all the heavy math happens up front, not mid-move.
Upload
Each module receives only its own portion of the move and confirms it loaded correctly. No silent failures.
Arm
Modules home themselves, travel to their start marks, and report ready — a checklist, just like a real set.
Go
One broadcast beacon starts every module against a shared clock. Motors, lights and camera triggers execute in lockstep, and encoders record what actually happened.
Eight modules. One wireless language. None mandatory.
Every module runs the same brain (a ~$6 ESP32-S3) and speaks the same open protocol, so they stack into one synchronized rig. A lone pan/tilt head is a complete product — everything else is additive.
Shoot it, then open it in Blender
Every take produces a move file: the camera's position, rotation, lens settings and lighting state for every frame. Import it into Blender or Unreal and your virtual camera matches the real one — no motion tracking, no guesswork.
It works both ways: design a move in Blender, and the hardware performs it on set. Previz becomes the shot.
$ unzip -l shot_042_take_03.omfx
manifest.json what happened
planned/ the move you designed
performed/ what encoders measured
camera.json lens & exposure metadata
lights/ every cue, every dimmer
Six rules the whole project obeys
Repeatability over speed
A phone weighs less than 300 g. We spend the torque surplus on precision, not whip-pans.
The network is untrusted
All timing-critical execution is local to each module. Wi-Fi carries plans, never motion.
Boring parts, clever geometry
NEMA17 motors, GT2 belts, standard rails — the 3D-printer supply chain. The novelty lives in printed parts and firmware.
Every take is data
If it happened on set, it lands in the move file — camera, lens, lights, all of it.
No module is mandatory
A lone pan/tilt head is a complete product. Everything else is additive.
Documentation is a deliverable
Bad docs are a top complaint against commercial gear. Ours are part of the spec.
Designed in the open, built in the open
OpenMotionFX is currently in the planning and bench-prototyping phase. The full system architecture, hardware specs, software design and VFX pipeline are written and public — the first physical prototypes come next. No hardware is for sale, and nothing on this site claims otherwise.
The plan is phased so that every phase ends with something a filmmaker can actually shoot with, starting with the pan/tilt head.
roadmap --current
PHASE 0 bench prototype ● now
PHASE 1 pan/tilt + app next
PHASE 2 slider + turntable
PHASE 3 lights + sync box
PHASE 4 dolly + focus
PHASE 5 public launch