Making films with phones
By Emily Camastra
Sept. 25, 2004 9:00 p.m.
To discover the next frontier in digital filmmaking, one
needn’t venture far ““ just take a look at your cellular
phone.
While plastic dinosaurs, yodeling custard, and garage bands may
not seem like standard entertainment fare, Juliette Deinum, a UCLA
alumna and cofounder of the “World’s Smallest Film
Festival,” expects this new medium to explode in the United
States as it has already in Asia and Europe.
Aside from the oncoming availability of this technology, what is
probably most exciting about this new medium, especially for
college students, is that anyone interested in digital filmmaking
and animation has the opportunity to submit their
two-to-three-minute short films and share their work with an
international audience.
“With the World’s Smallest Film Festival, we wanted
to merge the creative with the technological,” Deinum
said.
The Festival is held in different cities around the world and
showcases short films, of two to three minutes in length, made
specifically for mobile phones. The upcoming event to be held in
London next week has garnered a lot of attention recently as mFlix,
a mobile phone film channel created by Deinum and husband Beau
Buck, has been added as one of Sprint’s seven video
channels.
This past August, Sprint announced that it would launch a
multimedia service that would deliver streaming video from CNN,
NBC, Fox Sports, The Weather Channel, E! Entertainment, Twentieth
Century Fox, as well as mFlix, which would be the only independent
channel on Sprint’s Media Service. While the accessibility of
such technology may seem limited today, Beau believes that the new
medium will blaze new trails in the access of entertainment.
“Currently, only the Samsung A700 phone has the
capabilities to transmit such video,” he said. “But by
the end of 2005, there will be twenty-two such phones on the
market.”
Many mobile filmmakers are young people who have recognized
mobile technology as an opportunity to break into the filmmaking
industry. Buck acknowledges that a geographic issue plays a part in
a filmmaker’s success. He likens mFlix to the self-publishing
movement in that it gives everyone access to the market.
“It’s going to be harder for someone who lives in
Iowa to break into filmmaking,” he said.
Mobile filmmakers are an international commodity. A notable
figure is an Italian named Roberto Crochi, who refers to himself as
“La Bestia” (the Beast). He has won several awards at
the World’s Smallest Film Festival for a series of vignettes
called “Cooking with the Beast,” in which over the span
of one minute, he comically explains how to make an octopus salad
Italian-style.
Now living in Venice, Calif., Crochi creates mobile films about
urban American life. His latest creations delve into world of
illegal street car racing in East Los Angeles.
“I saw the phone as the next TV,” Crochi said.
“You have to tell a story in one minute and it’s not
easy. It’s got to be quick, funny and useful.”
As a new medium, Crochi believes that mobile films require a new
format to engage viewers. Otherwise people won’t bother to
watch. He takes an episodic approach in that he divides his
documentaries about street car racing into different categories.
The approach seems to be successful in that his “Tribes of
America” films are currently among the most downloadable
items on mFlix.
“There is no limit to the creativity we are seeing in
these films,” Deinum said. “Anyone with a creative urge
can be a part of this movement, whether they’ve been to film
school or not.”
