Robert Redford was on CNN (Wed 13 Feb 2008) discussing short films, small screens and his Sundance Film Festival. You can get the latest batch of short film submissions via the Sundance website.

There is definitely a case for changing the production technique for tiny screens, as various mobile TV services have uncovered (e.g. news tickers don’t work well, nor multi-view formats etc.) There is nothing unique to mobile about short film-making - obviously news channels bombard us with short clips all the time, and it is still the speciality of MTV and similar channels to assume that we have tiny attention spans. But, this is all basic production stuff.

The idea being explored here is a perennial theme in mobility. Do we take old ideas, like the Web, and re-invent them for the mobile, or do we try out hardest to make the old ideas work on the mobile by packing more capability into these tiny devices. However, film-making, it seems to me, is different to the web-WAP problem we’ve had for too long. One of the problems with WAP (and still with the mobile web, if we’re honest) was that it was relatively difficult for users to create sites. With video, it’s very easy, at least technically, to make short films and save them in a mobile format. In fact, as am amateur film-maker, it is, in many ways, easier to make a short/small film than it is to make a long/big one. Notwithstanding the challenge of story-telling in short bursts, the production time is less and it’s far easier to handle small files etc.

I wonder what kind of artistic innovation there will be in film-making uniquely for mobile, besides short films. My own favourite, that I discussed with a film-making friend a while back, was location-based viewing. This is where the film-maker goes out and films on location and tells a story that can only be uncovered by the viewer actually visiting the location to watch the video. It’s actually a fantastic sensation to visit a place and then watch some film taking place in that location whilst standing in it! Of course, I don’t mean happy-slapping .

Whilst Chief Apps Architect at Motorola, one of the last projects I worked on in the Mashing Room was using 3G videophony to make and deposit tiny films “on the map” at the caller’s current location. The caller could also pick up other films left in the vicinity.

Some mobilists, like my good friend Tomi Ahonen, are suggesting that the mobile is the 7th mass media and that, just as TV changed everything (after cinema), the mobile is set to change everything (after TV). I do think that there will eventually be huge interest in ‘mobile TV’ services, but not until we get the ecosystem right for the users. Not only has it got to be dead easy to find and manage content, but we have to take into account that the mobile experience simply doesn’t marry with the broadcast model (e.g. DVB-H) now being heavily considered and pushed by numerous operators and broadcasters.

By the way, I heard that the rumoured sequel for Cloverfield is the same story from another camera - the one seen on Brooklyn bridge (for those looking carefully), which, if memory serves (and it is failing) was a mobile phone cam. I’m not sure my senses will be up to watching a feature film made on a mobile cam.

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