Pocketcine's blog

About a year ago, when I was asked to define what I meant by "mobile viral video," I offered what I thought was a commonly accepted definition. "An outrageous and contagious short funny video made for mobile playback."

I was quite surprised to hear almost the same words last week from somebody reviewing the emerging body of work the Pocketcine project has produced. Commenting on the three or four videos I presented, this person told the group she did not think any of the videos she had seen fitted that description. Plus she complained about the music.

I have been having an ongoing dialog with David Vogt on the nature of narrative and (to use a term much beloved by the Mobile Muse technical guru Jim Udall) its instantiation as mobile shorts. David has been on the sidelines commenting on the development of a storyline called "Queen of Spades," a kind of film noir short in classical 2D animation. It is intended as a test of 2D animated shorts on mobile phones. 

David is hard to please and he has pretty well shot down everything I have come up with so far.

I was thinking about this problem about an hour ago, using a method that has always been effective. I went for a walk to do some grocery shopping, passing through Moody Park, a big city park about two blocks from my house. On my way back, lost in thought, I looked up. I came across a scene. It was a young Asian mother and her baby in a baby carriage. She was flailing in the air. As I got nearer I realized that she was using a stick to poke at a long yellow strap dangling from the branch of tree. The strap formed a loop with two keys on the end. (The keys to her house?) She was trying to get it down using a long branch. It was not long enough. I have no idea how the keys got up there, about ten feet in the air.

I was recently told by an associate that finding the formula for a viral video hit is a kind of holy grail among mobile video producers. But he doubted it could be done.

I agreed with him. It would be like finding the formula for the world's funniest joke. If everybody had the formula, then one's joke would be just as funny as another's. There would be no funniest joke.

However people do go to movies expecting them to tell well-known stories, some of them entirely predictable, like a Jane Austen novel brought to the screen. Hollywood churns them out. Obviously being a successful entertainment conglomerate involves other strategies besides storytelling, such as creative distribution deals and marketing.

When I first saw “The Annoying Thing” playing on a cell phone screen I realized I was witnessing the birth of a new medium. It is comparable to early Hollywood films, like “The Virginian.

The Virginian was DeMille’s first solo effort, a film based on a novel. I found it showing  on the Turner movie classics channel last weekend and watched it for about 45 seconds. It was like watching an elephant dance…amazing for its time (1914) but pretty crude and heavy-handed seen from a  contemporary perspective. Apparently film critics consider it a magnificent failure as well.