一 二 三 Action!: Chinese Cell Phone Owners as Short-Film Makers
Shanghai based Metroer, just ended their national cell-phone enabled short-film competition. Filmmakers who created 2 minutes of original works were eligible to submit their films via their cell to Metroer's website. Films could have been produced on any format, just as long as they were submitted via cell. "It is a good way for the public to have fun," said Liu Haibo, a teacher at Shanghai University's School of Film and Television Technology.
There has a flurry of experimentation combining cell-phones and traditional media.
- Ithica College in New York hosted the CellFlix Festival for "Cellular Short Films." It was a nationwide 30-sec cell phone movie submission competition. The winner won $5,000.
- Forum des Images in Paris held its first Pocket Film Festival for cellphones.
- US based Zoie Films says they hosted the first cell-phone film festival, where movies could be viewed on Nokia, Sprint and AT&Tmulti-media phones.
- MTV and Motorola just teamed for 3 years to play with $75 million to produce wireless device programming. One recent result is Head and Body, an international mini-doc series created just for cell phones. They have a series blog and also country specific webpages - here's the link for China.
I am excited by all these projects - especially Metroer because it signals more collaborative, digital and device-crossover work to come out of China. Building out cell-phones to be our all-in-one portable computer seems to be the R&D direction.
FYI: A recent American media project that I've been keeping an eye on is Sanctuary. The director put all her footage online as the world's first exploration of new production and distribution methods, where anyone can edit her footage. On the editing end, Diva, scalable open-source editing software, only runs on Linux Gnome desktops as it is in their exploration phase. I just spoke with Jin Ge about open-distributive editing with his Gold Famers project in Shanghai. Hopefully him and Kenyatta Cheese collaborate on exploring how to make this happen with his work - maybe trying Diva out?
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