Welcome to 'Cellywood': Movies Hit the Tiny Screen

HOLLYWOOD, May 5, 2007 — -- Filmmaker Maria Maggenti recently made a small movie, a very small movie. It's only four and a half minutes long and it was shot for viewing on the 2-by-2-inch screen of a cellular telephone.

"I had to think in terms of a 2-by-2 frame, that was three to five minutes, that was accessible to a wide audience, and that children would be able to watch," she said.

She made a movie about her little dog going off on an adventure by himself in Los Angeles -- "Los Viajes de King Tiny."

Hers was one of five experimental small movies commissioned by the Sundance Film Institute to explore what might work in the burgeoning art of making movies for the handheld screen.

Although it is already possible to download television shows and movies to iPods and a few cellular telephones, there is some question in the entertainment industry about whether people will want to watch the next "Spider-Man" on their telephone.

The answer may be mini movies made for what some are already calling "the fourth screen," coming after theaters, television and the computer screen. The industry already has a nickname -- "Cellywood."

What the market may be, and how much people are willing to pay is an unknown, according to Charles Golvin of Forrester Research. He says that right now, only about 4 percent of cell phone users watch any kind of video on their telephones, but in the hypercompetitive cell phone industry, carriers are looking for new things to sell their customers.

"Whether it's downloading music or browsing the mobile Web or watching videos," Golvin said, "It's a very strong initiative on their part to try to get other content into consumers' hands."

"I think it will be huge," Maggenti said, with the same kind of energy she seems to pour into her work. "It's short-attention-span theater, and that's kind of exciting for filmmakers, because we rarely get a chance to do short films that aren't a commercial."

One of the other films for the Sundance project was made by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris, directors of the Oscar-wining "Little Miss Sunshine." It's a slow-motion slapstick of bright images set to music in which mimelike characters pop balloons and have water splashed in their faces.

Several of the directors chose to make films with big images and little or no dialogue, so that they could be downloaded and understood in any country.

Across the country, Cory Mcabee, an urban-cowboy artist-musician-filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., made a short musical of himself singing to the security cameras in a bodega.

Mcabee said he was worried about sound quality but "Doing the sound for the film was actually one of the benefits. The sound quality is great. It's an MP3 file, and people listen to them on their headphones."

Mcabee said he sees almost unlimited possibilities for mini movies.

"I mean, people, there's more small screens in the world right now than there are big screens," he said.