Etienne Sauret is an award-winning New York filmmaker. A few years ago, he started his own company, MYT Works (pronounced “Mighty”). As his logo says, it was “born out of frustration” with the equipment he was using.
Etienne grew up in Annecy, France in a family of machinists, followed his creative muse to an MFA in film at NYU, and has now come full circle by founding and running an advanced cine design and manufacturing company near Industry City in Brooklyn. There, amid the latest CNC machines and precision tools, Etienne and his crew design and build beautiful camera sliders, skaters and rover dollies, motion control gear, nodal heads, tie-downs, half-balls, bowls, plates, quadripods and advanced camera and lens checkout bays.
The MYT Works Opti-Glide checkout system consists of an ingenious overhead track under which a motorized focus chart glides from near to far. Instead of running your tape measure from camera to chart, a large monitor automatically displays the exact distance, accurate to 1/100 inch. There are various theories on doing this: some rental houses move the camera; others move the chart. Optic-Glide can accommodate both.
Etienne is a polymath. When his massive 18.5 ton CNC machine arrived and wouldn’t fit inside his Brooklyn factory, he designed a rail system to move it from street to interior and then cut away the floor to lower it into the basement. He designed the shop’s hydronic heating system. In the garden at the back of the office, free-range French hens supply eggs for lunch. mytworks.com
(This is a “reprint” from August 2020 FDTimes issue 104.)