Move Over, Sundance: Cell Phone Film Festival Takes Off

May 2, 2007 — -- When Dianne Lynch, dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, suggested to her fellow academics during the winter of 2005 that the college sponsor a cell phone film festival, many of them were skeptical.

But, last month, Ithaca College in cooperation with Texas Instruments, held its second annual CellFlix Festival, a cellular film competition open to high school and college students nationwide.

"People treated it as a joke," said Lynch in an interview with ABC News. "Last year, it was something of a novelty. The idea that cell phones could be used not just as phones, but as a capture device had not caught on yet."

Now, a year later, thanks in large part to the success of file-sharing Web sites like YouTube and Flickr, there are hundreds of mobile device film festivals on the Internet and across the country.

"It's nice to know we were the first," Lynch said. "It's become a tradition on campus."

This year, the CellFlix Festival was held from Feb. 28 to April 15 and received approximately 100 submissions from students as close as Ithaca College and Cornell University and as far away as the University of Michigan and University of Cincinnati.

The CellFlix Festival challenged aspiring filmmakers to create a 30-second film shot on a cell phone. Content, editing, lighting and all other aspects of making the clip were open to the filmmakers as long as it was shot on a mobile device and did not exceed the time limit. Once the films were posted, viewers were allowed to rate the films on a scale of 1 to 4 (4 being "very good").

Entries ranged in content from the comical, such as Chris Spinato's "War of Words," which showed two men arguing with each other through a game of Scrabble, to the serious, Joshua Corey and Jacob Ritley's "In Case of Fire," which depicted a man's grief and sorrow after losing his family in a fire.

"We received such a range of stories. It's remarkable what people come up with," said Lynch.

One of this year's judges, Rodd Perry, an Ithaca College alumnus and the CEO of entertainment advertising company the Ant Farm, was equally amazed by the breadth and quality of the students' submissions.