Six directors from the 2007 Sundance Film Festival recall their journeys making short films specifically for cell phones.

BY JUSTIN LOWE

While most Sundance Film Festival attendees were still comparing notes or tallying deals following the 2007 fest, a handful of filmmakers were jetting off to Barcelona with Sundance programmers to screen their new films. These weren’t the hot narratives or popular documentaries from the recent festival, however, but rather a collection of short films crafted specifically for cell phones and other mobile devices.

While some fests have already incorporated program content created on or for cell phones, the Sundance festival has yet to adopt this small-screen format. So John Cooper, director of programming for the Sundance Film Festival and creative director at the Sundance Institute, was perhaps understandably leery when the GSM Association approached him about commissioning a selection of shorts for cell phones and handhelds. The GSMA is the global trade association representing manufacturers and service providers in 217 countries, which collectively serve more than 2 billion mobile phone users. (GSM is the predominant cell phone standard worldwide, although U.S. phones primarily rely on the CDMA standard.)

After learning more about the technology and the ability of many GSM phones to stream and play back video, Cooper spoke with several filmmakers about making short films for mobile phones. “They were actually really excited about it,” he recalls. “It wasn’t a big commitment; it was kind of like a fun experiment.” Sundance provided each filmmaker with a budget of $20,000 and specified a three-to-five-minute running time but otherwise gave the directors artistic freedom to complete their projects by the January deadline.

GSMA collaborated with mobile phone technology sponsors Roamware and NXP to provide the budget for the Sundance Film Festival Global Short Film Project, and the institute selected six directors to create five shorts: Little Miss Sunshine filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, The Foot Fist Way director Jody Hill, writer-directors Cory McAbee (The American Astronaut) and Maria Maggenti (Puccini for Beginners) and Finishing the Game director Justin Lin. In mid-February, Sundance brought all of the filmmakers to the 3GSM World Conference in Barcelona to present their shorts, participate in press conferences and interact with attendees. The films were available for mobile phone users to download at booths operated by the Institute, Roamware and NXP.

Faris and Dayton directed A Slip in Time, a silent film replete with some of the classic conventions of slapstick comedy, including the slippery banana peel and cream-pie-in-the-face gags, rendered in exquisite slow motion. “We thought it would be interesting to go back to that time when film was more purely visual,” observe the filmmakers.

In a far more conceptual take on the project, Cory McAbee cast himself as a convenience store cowboy in Reno, which depicts multiple images of his character singing about his motorcycle travels around Nevada, captured on the store’s security camera (with a soundtrack performed by McAbee’s band, the Billy Nayer Show).

Jody Hill’s Learning to Skateboard is perhaps the most conventional of the five films, a short comedy about a rebellious office drone trying to reclaim his sense of freedom and youth by calling in sick to work and taking the day off to attempt skateboarding for the first time. Shot digitally on 24P in Fredericksburg, Va., Foot Fist Way and Skateboard actor Danny McBride’s hometown, the film is largely improvised, relying on McBride’s goofy acting style and spontaneous dialogue to elicit laughs.

“There was no shooting script or storyboard,” Hill explains. “We just had a basic character sketch and decided to go out and shoot.” Similar to the scripting, the production was also fairly informal. “We just did run-and-gun the whole way,” says Hill, who operated the camera himself while directing McBride and a few supporting actors, recording sound with the on-camera mic and making creative decisions as they went along. “A lot of it was just trial and error since I’ve never made anything for the small screen before,” Hill notes.

McBride’s laughable attempts at skateboarding, which include quite a few shots with cross-screen motion, appear to play well on a small format. “I just kind of lined everything up toward the center as much as possible to give you a nice clean frame so you could see the action clearly,” says Hill. Another concern was extraneous elements in the frame. He observes, “You don’t want to have too much detail in the background, too many things moving around the actors, so we tried to keep that pretty free.”

In addition to the technical considerations of shooting for the 2x2-inch cell phone screen, Hill tried to anticipate viewers’ interests as well. “I wanted to shoot something that was spontaneous and improv, but still give it a cinematic quality,” he reflects. “I wanted to set it apart from general, frivolous Internet content. That was a challenge.”

When Maria Maggenti was in search of inspiration for her short, she found it right at home: her miniature-breed dog King Tiny is the star of Maggenti’s film Los Viajes de King Tiny. Left at home for the day by his fictional owner, the film follows King Tiny as he makes a break for the freedom of the urban outdoors, traveling across Los Angeles by foot and city bus before his journey leads to an unexpected discovery.

“I think the most important thing for all of us who did this project was that we had complete creative freedom — it was thrilling!” Maggenti exclaims. Like many other filmmakers, she wasn’t familiar with directing content for mobile phones. “First thing I did: I went to Best Buy and pretended I was going to buy a phone that had video capabilities and walked around the store with it, checking out focal length, depth of field, resolution, color and actually what people’s faces looked like on a small screen,” she explains.

“For production itself I kept it simple: me, my producer [Nancy Valle], my friend Molly Kochan (credited with ‘everything else’) and, of course, King Tiny,” she says. As the star of the film, Maggenti’s dog is a scene-stealer, but he also came with certain limitations. “Our film took five non-consecutive days to shoot because the dog couldn’t do more than a couple of hours at a time.”

Maggenti D.P.’ed the film herself while directing King Tiny but didn’t use a script or storyboard, although she did have a shot list. “Nancy got us [two] great high-def cameras to shoot on, so I gave one camera to whoever else was around to get my B-roll.” Like the other filmmakers on the project, Maggenti faced the challenge of grasping how viewers would approach the short subject and interpret her visual style. She initially ruled out long shots, “but now I’m thinking that you can probably get away with them, because everyone knows what a long shot is, so even if it isn’t beautiful they’ll still get it,” she says.

“I think the things I learned all came when we got to Barcelona and we saw how our movies worked in the world — my film at four minutes is definitely too long,” Maggenti concludes. Nonetheless, John Cooper says Los Viajes de King Tiny was among the most requested shorts that users downloaded at the Barcelona trade show.

Justin Lin’s film ¡La Revolución de Iguodala! is probably the most complex of the shorts. More thematic than narrative in style, it depicts the fictional historical figure Iguodala, a Mexican firebrand whose passionate message of revolution inspires people around the world, even as it’s co-opted through time by the forces of popular culture. This perspective on the commodification of rebellion is reinforced at the midpoint of the film, as Iguodala’s image begins appearing on T-shirts, TV and advertisements. “Iguodala is really kind of a mix between Che and Zapata. They’re figures in history that have really achieved this pop icon status,” notes Lin.

Shot over eight days primarily on high-def and various types of 35mm stock, Revolución incorporates more than 20 locations, including studio sets, greenscreen and Los Angeles–area exteriors. The postproduction is a bravura blend of quick cuts, multiple exposures, visual effects and even some Flash animation.

Exploring the medium of the 2x2 screen was part of the learning process that contributed to many of Lin’s creative decisions. “I didn’t know the answers,” he admits. “I had to go and shoot stuff, shrink it down to 2x2, look at it and see how [it worked]. You would think that on a 2x2 you could get away with everything, but what I learned was, you can’t. When you shoot video or you shoot film, you can tell” which format is being used, he explains. Surprisingly, perhaps, Lin also discovered that the small-screen format doesn’t impose as many limitations as filmmakers might expect. “The one very encouraging thing was that a lot of people think that if you’re showing it on a small tiny screen you’re confined to just close-ups, which is not the case. I did find that the editing rhythm changed [on the small format], because even though you can see everything, the rhythm is much faster on a 2x2,” he observes. “Other than that, you can do a lot of things: you can still tell a story, and by doing that, I think the short-film format actually is the perfect fit for that kind of screen.”

After completing two studio movies and Finishing the Game, his second indie, Lin says that he still learned a lot by making a short film for the small screen. “I think it’s viable on both the creative side and also on more of an exhibition side too,” he says of the format’s potential to challenge filmmakers and entertain audiences.

Reflecting on the directors’ involvement with the Global Short Film Project, Cooper reveals, “I wanted them to work hard on this, but I didn’t want it to be any hardship at all, because independent film is always a hardship and I wanted this to be a good experience, even from that point of view.” In fact, the filmmakers involved in the project are overwhelmingly positive about the opportunities it offered them. “This was a great experience in so many ways: creative freedom, a healthy budget, new technology,” Maggenti says. “It was so incredible to be commissioned to make something and not have to sell anything in the process.”

Going forward, the Sundance Film Festival is evaluating the success of the Global Short Film Project and considering ways to integrate mobile content into existing fest programs. “Artists lead the way,” Cooper says. “We’re always relearning this — the creatives pioneer the new frontier of all this stuff.” So maybe it’s time to invest in that new video-capable phone in anticipation of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Meanwhile, to download any of the Global Short Film Project titles, first check that your phone supports video playback, then send the text message “FILM” to +44-7624807811 (data transfer fees may apply) or visit the project Web site for more information: sundance.gsm.org.