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.

"When I heard about it [CellFlix Festival] last year, I was skeptical," Perry said, "but I was really impressed by what I saw. People put a lot of thought and time into how to use this cell phone as a tool for telling a story."

Perry along with fellow alumnus Russell Harnden III, a senior editor for Toy Box Entertainment, was given the task of selecting this year's Judges Prize winner. The prize was awarded through a blind judging process that masked an entrant's school affiliation and biographical information.

Out of the 11 finalists for 2007's Judges' Award, top honors went to Zack Wilson, a senior TV-radio major at Ithaca College, for his short film, "Assisted Living." He received a $5,000 check for his win. Wilson's piece is set in a nursing home and contrasts an elderly woman's passion for life with that of her young nurse.

"I came up with about five ideas. I passed them around my friends and this was the one they all liked the best," Wilson said in an interview with ABC News. He said his idea originally came from a friendship he forged with an elderly man he had met in a hospital in Australia after having his appendix removed.

The Pittsburgh, Pa., native said the moral of his winning entry was "to always be conscious of your life and to do the things you really want to do without any regrets."

Billy Feldman, a junior film, photography, and visual arts major at Ithaca College, also walked away a winner, taking home the Texas Instruments Audience Award for his entry, entitled "Shellfish." Feldman's humorous piece about a life-size lobster and his human girlfriend received the highest average viewer rating of 3.28, out of a possible 4.00.

"My piece was about a lobster apologizing to his girlfriend for being a shellfish," Feldman said. "It came about, in part, because I have an irrational fear of lobsters and because, for the past 10 months, I've been living with my girlfriend and at times I have the tendency to be selfish."

Despite this year's win, Feldman sees cell phone film contests as a "passing fad." Ithaca's Lynch seconded Feldman's opinion, but also pointed out that this technology was rapidly becoming outdated.

"We have to stay ahead of the curve," she said, explaining that an Internet generation spans approximately three years.

"There is a fundamental difference between the kids creating these CellFlix videos and my generation or even kids three or five years older than them. This generation sees themselves not only as the consumers of media, but as the producers of media as well. These videos were not made for my audience; they were made for those creating the content," she said.

At least for now, next year's CellFlix Festival is set to go on as planned. Who knows what the future of mobile technology holds, though. By next year cell phones may be passé, you know, so 2007.