Pocketcine's blog

In this article, we are going to get your creative juices going, by exploring a few ideas for mobile video shorts or programs.

We can say that what sets mobile video apart from other media is its “contextual” difference. Unlike a movie theater, a 40-inch LCD TV or a 20 inch LCD computer monitor, which are embedded in a fixed context (a cinema, the den or living room), a portable computer with Internet connectivity like Apple’s iPhone is stored in your pocket and activated whenever and wherever you find a need to connect (to the Internet or to another person) or when an SMS message or phone call prompts you to take it out of your pocket.

Creating a mobile video is actually very easy, especially for those who have created digital video for the Internet or submitted a video to YouTube. If you have not created video for the Internet or mobile playback, we’ll be providing a lot of detailed help in the tutorials that follow this.

Essentially all the rules governing the creations of video for the Internet also govern mobile video production. The focus is on creating a video that compresses really well. The video needs to be small both in terms of the final file size as well as the data rate of the video at any given moment. The smaller the file size, the quicker the video will start playing. The smaller the amount of changes from one frame to the next, the more smoothly and cleanly the video will play after compression.

Pocketcine Mobile Video Contest

On February 1, 2007, Pocketcine will be running a mobile video contest on Renderosity (www.renderosity.com). The contest runs from February 1, 2007 until February 28, 2007.

The theme of the contest is wide open. The mobile video you create for the contest can be on any subject, created with the software of your choice. The only requirement is that it be created in a pixel resolution (320x240) that will allow it to be played on new generation mobile devices like the iPhone. If you have ever created a video for YouTube, then you already know how to create a video for the contest.

Pocket Cine has done a number of mobile video projects over the past year. All them have explored some kind of aspect of mobile video.

The first one we did was for the organization Genome BC. The production process for creating the video is described in a www.pocketcine.com case history. The second was an ad for the Worst Case Scenario Mobile Video contest. The contest is now running in bookstores across Canada. My partner for the contest is Raincoast Books. The third was a commissioned piece that an artist, Newel Anderson did for me. And the fourth is also a commissioned piece that another artist, Jason Doll, did for me. The fifth was a live motion video used as an example for the Worst Case Scenario contest. There may be a sixth.

It is been just about almost year since I inked the last ideas for the Pocketcine project and framed it around the idea of mobile viral videos, then pitched it to the committee considering Mobile Muse projects. At the time there was huge hype around video for the mobile phone. My project treated the mobile phone and its video capability as a new medium that Canadian artists should explore and exploit.

I am sorry about the hype because it made people think I was making movies for the phone. Thankfully the hype has died down considerably. The pundits who never believed in the arrival of the new medium point to the tiny screen and say "who would want to watch a movie on that?"