Trendsurfing: Cellphone cinema (The Times)
By David Rowan
They're calling it "Cellywood" - the new moviemaking industry that fits into your cellphone. Ever since handsets evolved colour screens and data speeds rocketed, filmmakers amateur and professional have been experimenting to develop custom-made movies intended for mobile-phone screens. Suddenly, the cellphone cinema trend is luring big-name directors and dominating film festivals from Canada to China. Too bad no one's developed miniaturised popcorn that you can store behind your SIM card.
There are plenty of entertainment websites where you can download short animations or trailers to your video-enabled phone. Television studios are also customising series such as 24 and Doctor Who as short "mobisodes" intended for watching on cellphones. But now accomplished independent filmmakers are also jumping into the genre, directing short films intended to be watched on mobile phones. Robert Redford is the latest enthusiast, his Sundance Institute recently commissioning three- to five-minute shorts from talents such as Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team behind Little Miss Sunshine. “Cell phones are fast becoming the 'fourth screen' medium, after television, cinema, and computers," Redford said excitedly when he launched his Global Short Film Project last month. "I always loved shorts and I thought they were very entertaining. So I thought why couldn't we bring that back?"
Other directors, meanwhile, are experimenting with the video cameras incorporated into the phones themselves to make short films that can be sent from handset to handset. Earlier this year, the UK Film Council ran a competition for films between 90 seconds and three minutes filmed at least partly on a 3G mobile phone. Last month, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts together with Orange roped in directors including Ken Russell and Martha Fiennes to launch another short film competition, 60 Seconds of Fame, which encourages budding Hitchcocks to turn their telephones into portable film studios. You can even now take film-school courses devoted to cellphone cinematography. Boston University, for instance, runs classes in mobile-phone moviemaking, titled Producing for the Very Small Screen. Star pupils get to see their work distributed via a leading mobile-phone network.
Technology is obviously what is pushing the trend forward. As digital memory gets cheaper, transmission speeds grow and handsets become more sophisticated, video quality is improving exponentially, even if images are still typically grainy and juddery. Handset manufacturers are investing heavily in what they see as a potential growth market, with some models - such as Nokia's N93 - targeted specifically to filmmakers. But it is not just the hardware that is creating new opportunities. At the same time, the democratisation of content production and distribution is encouraging more amateurs to take on the professionals. That is why YouTube is buzzing with short clips recorded on mobile phones, often - because the handsets are so small - without the subjects' awareness that they are being filmed. Take the six-minute cult YouTube clip known as "Bus Uncle", in which a Hong Kong bus passenger surreptitiously films an increasingly aggressive argument between fellow passengers. The clip may not win any production awards, but it has already been seen more than 1.2 million times.
But is it art? The international film-festival circuit seems to think so, with new "best mobile short" categories springing up from Toronto to Taiwan. A recent Pocket Films Festival in Paris attracted almost 400 shorts shot on mobiles, which the festival organiser declared marked "the democratisation of filmmaking". So sit back and enjoy the new avant garde, or even better, use your phone to join in. Just be careful who you argue with on the bus home.
(The Times Magazine, December 2 2006)
They're calling it "Cellywood" - the new moviemaking industry that fits into your cellphone. Ever since handsets evolved colour screens and data speeds rocketed, filmmakers amateur and professional have been experimenting to develop custom-made movies intended for mobile-phone screens. Suddenly, the cellphone cinema trend is luring big-name directors and dominating film festivals from Canada to China. Too bad no one's developed miniaturised popcorn that you can store behind your SIM card.
There are plenty of entertainment websites where you can download short animations or trailers to your video-enabled phone. Television studios are also customising series such as 24 and Doctor Who as short "mobisodes" intended for watching on cellphones. But now accomplished independent filmmakers are also jumping into the genre, directing short films intended to be watched on mobile phones. Robert Redford is the latest enthusiast, his Sundance Institute recently commissioning three- to five-minute shorts from talents such as Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team behind Little Miss Sunshine. “Cell phones are fast becoming the 'fourth screen' medium, after television, cinema, and computers," Redford said excitedly when he launched his Global Short Film Project last month. "I always loved shorts and I thought they were very entertaining. So I thought why couldn't we bring that back?"
Other directors, meanwhile, are experimenting with the video cameras incorporated into the phones themselves to make short films that can be sent from handset to handset. Earlier this year, the UK Film Council ran a competition for films between 90 seconds and three minutes filmed at least partly on a 3G mobile phone. Last month, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts together with Orange roped in directors including Ken Russell and Martha Fiennes to launch another short film competition, 60 Seconds of Fame, which encourages budding Hitchcocks to turn their telephones into portable film studios. You can even now take film-school courses devoted to cellphone cinematography. Boston University, for instance, runs classes in mobile-phone moviemaking, titled Producing for the Very Small Screen. Star pupils get to see their work distributed via a leading mobile-phone network.
Technology is obviously what is pushing the trend forward. As digital memory gets cheaper, transmission speeds grow and handsets become more sophisticated, video quality is improving exponentially, even if images are still typically grainy and juddery. Handset manufacturers are investing heavily in what they see as a potential growth market, with some models - such as Nokia's N93 - targeted specifically to filmmakers. But it is not just the hardware that is creating new opportunities. At the same time, the democratisation of content production and distribution is encouraging more amateurs to take on the professionals. That is why YouTube is buzzing with short clips recorded on mobile phones, often - because the handsets are so small - without the subjects' awareness that they are being filmed. Take the six-minute cult YouTube clip known as "Bus Uncle", in which a Hong Kong bus passenger surreptitiously films an increasingly aggressive argument between fellow passengers. The clip may not win any production awards, but it has already been seen more than 1.2 million times.
But is it art? The international film-festival circuit seems to think so, with new "best mobile short" categories springing up from Toronto to Taiwan. A recent Pocket Films Festival in Paris attracted almost 400 shorts shot on mobiles, which the festival organiser declared marked "the democratisation of filmmaking". So sit back and enjoy the new avant garde, or even better, use your phone to join in. Just be careful who you argue with on the bus home.
(The Times Magazine, December 2 2006)
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