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"People have this
inherited legacy from the 1940's and '50's that you've
'made it' when your film is shown on a big screen,"
observes Andrew Apostola, who co-founded the Portable
Film Festival (PFF) online in 2006.
Indeed, it was cinema that historically seduced
audiences, filmmakers and visionaries, earning its
present reputation as the legendary "first screen." In
the 1960's, television had found its place in our homes
as the "second screen," while by the 1980's personal
computers came to occupy our workspace as the "third
screen." Today, mobile phones and iPods are referred to
as the "fourth screen."
After that, the fifth screen may be the GPS device on
your dashboard, but it might just as well be the screen
on the back of the seat in front of you on plane, trains
and automobiles.
As Lawrence Cheung of the Hong Kong Productivity Council
(HKPC) says: "In the car, you have screens that are
fitted left, right and center. You have a screen that
drops down, you have a screen that pops up from your CD
player. You have the split screen [which shows different
images when viewed from different angles], and another
screen that fits onto your rearview mirror. You have
screens everywhere."
And where there are screens, there will be content.
HKMFF: "Small screen, big story"
HKPC launched the first Hong Kong Mobile Film Festival (HKMFF)
in October 2007 in order to raise awareness among both
the public and the industry of the potential mobile
media market, as well as to encourage people to develop
mobile-specific content.
DMB (digital media broadcast) phones may already be
common gadgets in South Korea and Japan, but Hong Kong
has the second-largest mobile-phone penetration rate in
the world (after Luxembourg), closely followed by Macau
and Taiwan.
Meanwhile mainland China has the highest number of
mobile subscribers worldwide at almost 400 million, with
a monthly increase of 5-6 million.
As for Hong Kong's budding mobile content industry,
Cheung sees two possible directions for development.
The first is based on existing mobile handsets, where
the broadcaster would be the mobile-phone operator. In
this case, users would be charged according to the
pay-per-view model, either by clip or by time. Either
way, Cheung says, it's not good for market development,
as itemized charges discourage use.
The second direction would make use of a separate
broadcasting device calibrated to a protocol standard,
with a much higher resolution screen than standard
mobile phones. In this case, the business model would
likely be pay-per-channel, with unlimited viewing.
A successful takeoff, Cheung confirms, involves both
good content and a good device to view it on. This
year's 1st HKMFF seems to be a step in the right
direction, judging by both the quality of the finalists
and the enthusiasm of all involved.
The festival's Mobile Film Production Workshop attracted
some 300 individuals, including a speaker from
Singapore, while the contest itself drew entries from
local filmmakers ranging from advertising professionals
to primary school students. Platinum sponsors were
industry giants Nokia, 3 and Sanyo.
HKMFF's two big winners were a young media professional
specialized in animation and a group of pre-adolescent
girls making their first film (about "Graduation" from
primary school). As much as the two shorts and their
respective authors differed, they all had one thought in
common: They wanted their films to be seen by a lot of
people.
The girls from the Holy Family Canossian School in
Kowloon City were unanimous in their determination to
make a first film to commemorate their fleeting primary
school days together, no matter the format. "We used a
big camera to shoot, and then a small screen to view,"
they attested, "but we can also try other sizes."
Twenty-four-year-old Joseph Lam, a professional animator
and designer, says Web sites are his "favorite medium"
of distribution, where "the whole world" can see his
work. "The screen may be small," he says, "but people
can get what I want to say." The message of his
multiple-award-winning animation "Infection": Stop
criticizing!
PFF: "A Festival in Your Hands"
Part of HKMFF's logistical inspiration came from the
annual Portable Film Festival based in Sydney, which was
imagined long before YouTube and MySpace took over the
Web.
After seeing how iPods were first taking off in the
U.S., Apostola thought it would be great to see more on
portable media, and so launched PFF in Australia to make
more people aware of fourth-screen distribution.
"These films are not necessarily made-for-mobile, or
shot with one," insists Apostola.
His mission is to promote online viewing of creative
content on mobile media, and the curated PFF is a
platform for showcasing talent, now currently open to
2008 submissions.
But he agrees that the market for online and mobile
distribution is evolving very slowly, even in the
tech-trendy Asia-Pacific region.
Speaking for Hong Kong, HKMFF's Cheung says, "The main
thing is to develop a business model. If an independent
filmmaker comes up with a series of 5-minute shorts, it
could be very attractive. But how does he publish?
Through a mobile-phone channel? Or through an operator's
distribution network? The industry infrastructure has
yet to be established. I don't know how it will develop,
but where there's money, people will do something... It
will be a very exciting time in the next five years."
Sundance: "Short films, tall ideas"
In 2007, Sundance focused on innovative mobile movies by
challenging six independent filmmakers to make a short
especially for the mobile phone screen. The resulting
Global Short Film Project showcases five very different
films, for the most part experimental, which premiered
at last year's 3GSM Congress in Barcelona.
One of the artists, Maria Maggenti, remarked: "What's
interesting about this format is there's still a very
strong impulse that people have to share, the same way
that you go to the cinema." Furthermore, she used the
Kuleshov Effect to suggest emotional expressions on her
dog's face in the foreground during a day out in LA,
making her her clip all the more viral.
Another artist, Cory McAbee, reappropriated three
elements people were already used to seeing on a small
format -- photo-montage, computer loops and a
surveillance camera setting -- to make a
repetitive-obsessive music video set in a convenience
store.
Meanwhile Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, the couple
behind "Little Miss Sunshine" shot a slow-motion short
on slapstick stunts from the silent era.
McAbee is especially thrilled that "people who promote
independent work" are getting involved in this budding
new distribution media from the beginning, as he
commented, "There will come a time when it will be
difficult to be seen amongst all that stuff when it all
starts filling in."
In January 2008, Webby Awards founder and filmmaker
Tiffany Shlain sat down during the Sundance festival
with David Strauss, co-founder and CEO of film
distributor Without a Box, to chat about synergy between
making and distributing films.
Filmmakers should put "just as much creativity and
energy and resources into making a film as to getting it
out creatively into world," says Shlain. "The biggest
challenge is to make filmmakers understand that they're
also distributors."
It's "about turning filmmakers into entrepreneurs, and
giving them tools to be able to do that," says Strauss.
"It's very possible that your favorite film, you don't
even know about it yet. But through collaborative
filtering, you're going to find it."
We may not be there yet, but a successful collaboration
between creative content authors and profitable, popular
distribution is never too far off.
"Everyone uses the phrase like a badge of honor that
you're an 'independent filmmaker,'" says Shlain, "but I
think people need to start saying that you're an
'interdependent filmmaker.' There are so many support
networks and technologies that can support what you're
doing."
Source : CNN
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