[wooclosmercob]

Festival To Choose Best Cell-Phone Video

POSTED: 3:50 pm EST December 22, 2005

Young people are often told to think big.

But one upstate New York college dean is encouraging them to think small -- and mobile.

Ithaca College is inviting high school and college students across America to submit a 30-second movie shot entirely with a cell phone. The winner will take home $5,000 in the CellFlix Festival.

The submission deadline is Jan. 10. The contest rules say that any editing program can be used, and the movies must include audio. Submissions are uploaded through the contest's Web site.


Dean Dianne Lynch says the media landscape has been changed by cell phones. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the July bombings in London have shown what cell phone cameras are capable of, as everyday people used them to provide TV stations and the Internet with vivid images of the devastation.

There are an estimated 2 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide and about 194 million in the United States.

[Tumarimmicdak]

I would hate to be the Judge in that contest. No telling how many they will get.

[DoctorAlexandro]

Well, mobile phone video is a medium, and there are festivals and awards for just about every other medium going, so if it does no harm...

There's a few young Brits (maybe other nationalities, but I've not heard) who use their phones to video their friends beating people up. One group, including a 15-yr old girl, was recently found guilty of killing a man in a particularly brutal attack. They videoed themselves doing it. There's quite a lot of less violent pranksterism going on, just for the sake of videoing it.