Yuka Kojima in five minutah””Girl Thumb video is one of the works exhibited at the first Pocket Film Festival opens festival that last week in Yokohama., Featuring 48 films - all shot on camera-equipped mobile phones.
Forty-eight films selected from more than 400 entries from 18 countries - including Japan, Singapore, China, South Korea and Germany - will screen in competition at the festival, organized by Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.
The competition has two categories, one for the film will be shown on regular screens, and another for movies for viewing on mobile phones. The winning film will receive 500,000 yen (US $ 4500).
Vague and raw but urgently personal, these pocket-size statements on film, like Yuka Kojima a five-minute Thumb Girl”,” were selected from more than 400 positions in international competition.
The works, edited as digital files on a personal computer, have a voyeuristic feel because the cell phone is so unobtrusive, have been streaming on monitors of cell phones straps to the tables. Devoid of the typical grandeur of standard feature films, video pocket were filled with everyday shots, many taken in the village of chaotic streets and cars whizzing past in Blur.
“Of course, this resolution is relatively low by phone camera, so effective use, which is important,” organizer Yuko Mori said. “People have also made a film where only the camera phone can go. One entry in the class of children not attending school, even shot inside the refrigerator.”
The festival, which organizers say is the first in the country, marks yet another use for the omnipresent mobile phones in Japan, DoCoMo Capital, used ubiquitously to exchange e-mail, surf the Internet, read novels and navigate on digital maps.
The works also point to important new forms of art, said Masaki Fujihata, film professor of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and one of the judges of the festival.
”The cell phone is that you always carry around, so you can roll the camera on whim,”he said. Tam”v so close between the work and its creator. It is spontaneous.”Fujihata said he was particularly fond of the nine-minute pedestrian”,”, main symbol of a pair of slippers to take to get on the train.
Fujihata and other experts say the medium is opening the world of cinema solutions for the masses of amateurs in the same manner, YouTube phenomena.
People”,” witty puzzle-like piece Michiko Tsuda, 27, graduate student, uses a split screen to show images taken on two cell phones - one held by a man in the men’s room, and another woman in the women’s room. They each take video of their own image in the mirror, wander in the hallway, where they meet and then switch to the phone, all the time recording video.
Unlike regular films that require lots of money, people and time, cell phone film is easy cheap one-person operation. Even its relatively poor visual quality can be an advantage, often for arty imagery, they say.
Softbank and Sharp are supporting the event. Softbank, the main mobile operator, took over Vodafone Japan and Yahoo Japan. Sharp was the first company to sell a cell phone, in 2000 and is currently the leading manufacturer of TV-enabled phones.