Smartphone Filmmaking

Theory and Practice

Max Schleser

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501360343
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoría: Filmregie & Filmproduktion

Mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking is a global phenomenon with distinctive festivals, filmmakers and creatives that are defining an original film form. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice explores diverse approaches towards smartphone filmmaking and interviews an overview of the international smartphone filmmaking community. Interviews with smartphone filmmakers, entrepreneurs, creative technologists, storytellers, educators and smartphone film festival directors provide a source of inspiration and insights for professionals, emerging filmmakers and rookies who would like to join this creative community. While not every story might be appropriate to be realized with a mobile device or smartphone, if working with communities, capturing locations or working in the domain of personal or first-person filmmaking, the smartphone or mobile device should be considered as the camera of choice. The mobile specificity is expressed through accessibility, mobility and its intimate and immediate qualities. These smartphone filmmaking-specific characteristics and personal forms of crafting experiences contribute to a formation of new storytelling approaches. Stylistic developments of vertical video and collaborative processes in smartphone filmmaking are evolving into hybrid formats that resonate in other film forms. This book not only develops a framework for the analysis of smartphone filmmaking but also reviews contemporary scholarship and directions within the creative arts and the creative industries. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice initiates a conversation on current trends and discusses its impact on adjacent disciplines and recent developments in emerging media and screen production, such as Mobile XR (extended reality).

1

Introduction

Mobile, smartphone and mobile filmmaking is a global phenomenon with distinctive festivals, filmmakers and creatives who are defining an original film form. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice explores the diverse approaches towards smartphone filmmaking and provides an overview of the international smartphone filmmaking community.

This book not only develops a framework for the analysis of smartphone filmmaking but also reviews the contemporary scholarship and directions within the Creative Arts and the Creative Industries. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice initiates a conversation on current trends and discusses its impact on adjacent disciplines and recent developments in emerging media and screen production, such as Mobile XR (extended reality). The interviews with smartphone filmmakers, entrepreneurs, creative technologists, storytellers, educators and smartphone film festival directors provide a source of inspiration and insight for professionals, emerging filmmakers and rookies who would like to join this creative community.

Once upon a time, stories were told exclusively in the movie cinema. Then came broadband and smartphones as well as new forms such as vertical video, new platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook Stories, which established new storytelling formats in the contemporary mediascape. While global ‘streaming wars’ shake up the film industry, independent filmmakers need to reinvent themselves to tell their stories in a twenty-first-century context. This research will exemplify the case of smartphone filmmaking as a creative intervention and mobilization of digital filmmaking. Many of the emerging technologies and platforms challenge conventional storytelling approaches and our understanding about narrative as it was defined in the last decades. We only see the tip of the iceberg with new micro and short-form content streaming services and disruptive technologies like blockchain and new story worlds in XR experiences. For the world of smartphone filmmaking, these developments are liberating and provide new opportunities. While a more conservative position might see these developments and new story forms and formats as villains, in Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice these are the protagonists driving creative innovation in the hero’s journey of this research.

The Creative Arts research examined in this book emerges from within the smartphone filmmaking community. Max Schleser produced more than a dozen short and feature mobile and smartphone films, including Max with a Keitai and Frankenstorm. Since 2011 he curated the International Mobile Innovation Screening & Festival.¹ As mobile and smartphone filmmaking is a dynamic and fast-moving field of study, it is significant to provide a mobile, smartphone and mobile filmmaking–specific space for analysis. This book contributes to this endeavour that commenced with the world’s first mobile feature film screening in the Lumiere Cinema on Regent Street in London (UK) in 2008.

As a starting point within an academic context one can observe the formations in the shaping of mobile, smartphone and mobile filming as a field in its own right through books like Mobile Digital Art: Using the iPad and iPhone as Creative Tools (Leibowitz 2013), Smartphone Video Storytelling (Montgomery 2018), Smartphone Movie Maker (Stoller 2017), Hand Held Hollywood’s Filmmaking with the iPad & iPhone (Goldstein 2012), Making Movies with Your iPhone: Shoot, Edit, and Share from Anywhere (Harvell 2012) and mobile filmmaking guides such as GoPro: Professional Guide to Filmmaking (Schmidt and Thompson 2014). No publication to date has rigorously looked at mobile, smartphone or mobile filmmaking as a unique film form with its own qualities and characteristics. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice explores smartphone filmmaking’s aesthetic values and virtues, such as the significance of personal filmmaking ranging from political implications of representation to access to production tools and technologies, the notion of intimate filmmaking, the reference to the location and being close to the action and experience of the filmmaker. Chapter 6, ‘Creative Innovation’, examines the international renown smartphone feature films Tangerine and Unsane. While smartphone films are also produced in Hollywood with blockbuster budgets, screened at Festival de Cannes or Berlinale, this book will illustrate how filmmakers have broken rules of aspect ratio, image quality and narrative conventions to define creative innovation. The focus is on exploring new perspectives in form and content. Emerging formats and forms such as vertical videos, smartphone filmmaking specific aesthetics and authentic approaches to storytelling are discussed. This book also focuses on mobile moving-image arts and screen productions beyond the mainstream cinema and defines mobile and smartphone filmmaking with its specific qualities, dynamics and affordances.

Scholars like Camille Baker have pointed towards the mobile specificity in the context of performance in New Directions in Mobile Media and Performance (Baker 2018) or the edited collection Intersecting Art and Technology in Practice: Techne/Technique/Technology (Baker and Sicctio 2016). In a broader framework Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones (Schleser and Berry 2018) and Mobile Story Making in an Age of Smartphones (Berry and Schleser 2014) explored the creative potential and the social innovation that storytellers, creatives and researchers demonstrated through engaging with an original mobile and/or smartphone-specific approach within the Creative Arts and adjacent disciplines. Other collections like The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (Goggin and Hjorth 2014), Creating with Mobile Media (Berry 2017) or Creative Mobile Media: A Complete Course (Prasad 2017) analysed these developments around mobile media and smartphone creativity through media, communication and cultural studies or an ethnographic lens. In the documentary studies context, Helen De Michiel and Patricia R. Zimmermann’s Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (Zimmermann and De Michiel 2017) provides a theoretical framework aligned with the aims and objectives of this book in analysing the collective new media practices of smartphone filmmaking (Figure 1.1):

Figure 1.1 Mobile film festivals in 2012 (Schleser 2012).

Open space configures networks not solely as digital interfaces, but as the nexus of people, places, and technologies. Open space documentary designs environment and interactions for ongoing dialogues that may or may not be resolved. Open space documentary practice reclaims technologies for people.

(Zimmermann and De Michiel 2017, 144)

In 2019 the film festival submission platform FilmFreeway listed thirty-one festivals dedicated to smartphone filmmaking. Since mobile filmmaking surfaced more than a decade ago, it is time to discuss smartphone films through an original framework specific to the context of mobile, smartphone and mobile filmmaking. This book provides an overview of these developments and establishes five smartphone filmmaking specific modes. It is no longer possible to combine all approaches to smartphone filmmaking into one umbrella term without defining modalities as established in documentary studies (Nichols 2001) and more recently the field of i-docs, or interactive documentaries (Aston, Gaudenzi and Rose 2017).

Nichols’s, as much as Aston, Gaudenzi and Rose’s, framework identifies patterns in aesthetics that aligned with specific kinds of documentary and i-docs practice, respectively. The modes outlined here are not only a technical choice but also a creative approach. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice studies innovation in form and content in filmmaking processes in production, distribution and exhibition.

Chapter 2, ‘Towards a Theory and Practice of Mobile, Smartphone and Mobile Filmmaking’, introduces five distinctive smartphone filmmaking modes and defines these as an original film form. Furthermore, the Creative Arts research method of curating with reference to the International Mobile Innovation Screening & Festival (2011–19) is outlined and positions smartphone filmmaking in the domain of experimental film and moving-image arts. This book is written from an insider perspective as a smartphone filmmaker and screening director of MINA, the Mobile Innovation Network and Association. This chapter also outlines the mobile and smartphone filmmaking projects and the collaborations that MINA established during the smartphone film festivals and screenings since 2011 (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Selected films for screening and festival (23–6 November 2011) at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, the New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound, Wellington, New Zealand, Aotearoa (MINA 2011).

Chapter 3, ‘Spotlight on mobile and smartphone film festivals’, provides an overview of the global smartphone filmmaking scene. Smartphone film festivals are a networking and knowledge transfer hub for the international smartphone filmmaking community. These festivals are key in celebrating and showcasing the constant innovation in smartphone filmmaking. As passionate as smartphone filmmakers are smartphone film festival organizers. Their work needs to be recognized beyond the applause at screenings and festivals. This chapter also contributes to the area of film festival research and engages Susy Botello, Si-Simon Horrocks, Angela Blake, Michael G. Osheku and Karl Bardosh in a conversation on their understandings and ideas regarding smartphone filmmaking. The International Mobile Film Festival is about accessibility and providing a space to present the achievement of producing smartphone films and presenting works to an audience and fellow smartphone filmmakers. Festival Director Susy Botello places particular emphasis on celebrating this with the red-carpet moment. MoMo – Mobile Motion – is positioned as a springboard and talent hub. Festival co-founder Si places the same focus on the community element, which is also crucial for SF3, SmartFone Flick Fest, which brings audiences and smartphone filmmakers together. In an interview with Angela Blake, she also talks about the introduction of smartphone feature films to the SF3 festival, continuing the accessible and affordable approach beyond the short film environment. ASIFF, African Smartphone International Film Festival, demonstrates the cultural dimension for localized content and African stories. Michael G. Osheku emphasizes the economic contribution with the introduction of a short film market. Karl Bardosh, as co-founder of the Indian Cell Phone Film Festival, discusses opportunities for the educational approach beyond screen and digital media as well as visual arts. For him, smartphone filmmaking is ‘Hollywood in your Pocket’, and he describes smartphone filmmaking as an equalizer. The impact of smartphone filmmaki...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Towards a theory and practice of mobile, smartphone and mobile filmmaking
• 3 Spotlight on mobile and smartphone film festivals
• 4 Focus on smartphone filmmaking practice
• 5 New horizons: Creative Industries
• 6 Creative innovation
• Index
• Copyright