SmartPhoneToday: News: 3GSM: Sundance Premiers Films for the Mobile Screen

Last November, the GSM Association and the Sundance Institute announced they commissioned filmmakers to create short movies targeted at mobile handsets. The fruits of this endeavor, five 3-5 minute long films, are being shown at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona this week.

The purpose of what's called the Sundance Film Festival: Global Short Film Project is to extend independent filmmaking to what the Sundance Institute's president and founder Robert Redford referred to last year as "the 'fourth screen' medium, after television, cinema and computers."

This week, Sundance director of programming & creative director John Cooper added, "We hope that the Global Short Film project inspires filmmakers and artists to think outside of the realm of traditional venues for cinema, and experiment with mobile as an intimate new avenue - with global potential - for their work."

The filmmakers (see top picture) who took part in the project, and were given what's called a limited budget, include Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, behind the Oscar nominated 'Little Miss Sunshine', Justin Lin (known for 'Better Luck Tomorrow'), Maria Maggenti ('Puccini for Beginners'), Cory McAbee ('The American Astronaut') and Jody Hill ('The Foot Fist Way').

Here are the titles as well as pictures and short descriptions of the five films created for the Sundance Film Festival: Global Short Film Project:

images from Sundance Film Festival: Global Short Film Project Web site

1-'A Slip In Time' by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris: A motion study of slapstick comedy.

2-'Learning to Skateboard' by Jody Hill: A corporate worker calls in sick. In his quest to liberate himself from the daily grind he embarks on a quest for freedom by learning how to skateboard.

3-'�La Revolucion de Iguodala!' by Justin Lin: Tracks one man�s passionate message as it travels through various forms and agendas.

4-'Los Viajes de King Tiny' by Maria Maggenti: About a small dog who takes off by himself while his owner is at work. Set in Los Angeles, King Tiny travels the city but is confronted by his own personal demons in the process.

5-'Reno' by Cory McAbee: A singing cowboy brags about his travels through Nevada on a Honda 50 to a store security camera.

The Sundance Film Festival: Global Short Film Project experiment gives us an idea of what we can expect as the mobile video market matures. It's not just going to be about repackaging films and videos originally created for other mediums, but also original material developed specifically for the ultra-small screen. Some of it will be considered art, as the filmmakers for this project aimed to create, and much of it won't be, of course.

All five films listed above are slated to become available to the general public starting tomorrow.

Not Just for Watching
In addition to being a platform for viewing video, mobile handsets are increasingly being used for creating content as well.

For example, late last year an entire music videowas shot with Nokia's N93 camcorder phone. The director, Mike Hodgkinson, filmed the promo for former Catherine Wheel lead singer Rob Dickenson's song 'Oceans' used the smartphone with improvised tripods and in-hand at a number of locations, including underwater and even in the air, over the course of two days.

Before that actor and director Gary Oldman shot and posted a short-film called 'Donut' to promote Nokia's N93 camcorder phone in addition to a new video-sharing site called the Nokia Nseries Studio, itself designed to promote mobile movie making. Oldman's film features a round reflection of an inner tube in rippling water set to a soundtrack by a composer named Tor, while the site also features the work of number of other directors. Users can login and share their own clips, either from a PC or a mobile device, at Nokia Nseries Studio as well.

And in 2005, for only a few thousand dollars, including travel expenses, a pair of Italian filmmakers filmed a 93-minute movie, Nuovi Comizi D'Amore (New Love Meetings), with the N93's predessotr, Nokia N90. Directors Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi claimed it was the first full-length film to be shot with a mobile handset. The film is homage to a 1965 documentary Love Meetings by Pier Paolo Pasolini, which Interviewed people about their love lives. Mencarini and Seghezzi said they the N90 to find out what has changed in the intervening forty years.