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A dream screen
8 March 2001

Making film for Palm OS handhelds is tough, but Chloe Veltman finds one man pushing the limits of the fledgling art form

When Rodney Ascher stepped into a San Francisco bar for a cocktail one evening, he had no intention of turning a quiet drink into the subject of a film, least of all a film people could carry around with them in their pockets.

"I happened to have a disposable camera on me and on a whim took 24 shots, thinking one might be suitable for the cover of a friend's punk rock album," he remembers. As things transpired, none of the pictures was punk rock material. However, with a little digital animation magic, they became the source for a miniature movie, a 30-second neon jewel created to fit a PDA (personal digital assistant).

Most people still think of PDAs as electronic organisers in which to store addresses or make notes: sending email over a handheld device is still considered to be radical. With their tiny interfaces and even smaller memories, not even the most short-sighted of film makers could call the PDA a dream screen.

But for Jason Wishnow, a 27-year-old digital movie pioneer and the founder of NewVenue.com , established in 1996 as the first curated website for films made expressly for the internet, the handheld device is the moving picture's new frontier. "Originally, I wanted to push the limits of the internet because that was a new,unexplored medium. Now the PDA offers similar challenges to the early days of online film."

The challenges facing anyone making a film for PDA are daunting. "Video on a PDA is like video on the web a few years ago - small, choppy and the less detail the better," says Wishnow. Aside from the compromising size of the screen and pea-sized memory, there's the fact that many PDAs can only play video in black and white and do not have sound. "They are day planners, they are organisers, they are modest productivity tools. PDAs were not built to be home entertainment centres," says Wishnow. "But because they are powered by a microchip, they can be."

Seeing these technological shortcomings as a virtue, Wishnow launched the world's first PDA film competition in November. Known as The Aggressively Boring Film Festival, 69 digital artists and film-makers submitted entries that could be downloaded from the NewVenue website (www.newvenue.com/takeout) to the Sony CLIƒ handheld device and played using the gMedia playback software produced by the Palo Alto-based wireless multimedia company Generic Media.

Festival entries ranged from Dan Rootman and Chris Shiki's Bad Ass Jack and the Fat Stack, a grainy spoof gangster flick with dialogue cards to tell the story in lieu of sound, to Louise McKissick's first prize-winning I Love You. This 15-second visual poem about the I Love You computer virus involves the artist's lips whispering sweet nothings to 3,000 ladybirds crawling on the inside of a tea cup.

The technology for streaming video has greatly evolved. On March 1, Generic Media launched its gMovie Maker, allowing users to convert video, animation and still images into the gMovie format on Macintosh and Windows-based computers. The gMovie files can then be transferred to a handheld device using the gMovie player, which works on all Palm OS devices, not just the CLIƒ. Although the system does not yet support audio, PDA videos can now appear in glorious colour.

For McKissick, the mobile platform simply presents a new outlet for expression. "I'm always trying to put my work in an unconventional format. I like the idea of being in places where people don't usually expect to come across art." While for Ascher, the tech nology provides a new challenge: "You have to force yourself to pare down your work to the bare minimum and create really simple, iconographic images."

Despite the merits of experimenting with a new technology and the creativity of the film makers, the future of streaming video on handheld devices doubtless lies beyond the realm of art house cinema. "Think about mobile TVs. Did they take off?" asks Brad Smith, the data editor at the wireless industry publication Wireless Week. Wireless video companies such as the San Diego-based PacketVideo are concentrating on promoting consumer content such as news headlines, sports highlights, games and online trading to complement their web-streaming technology. "Streaming video to handheld devices is about providing people with information they need to know right now," says Lauren Cole, of PacketVideo's applications and services department.

Nevertheless, Wishnow is not giving up on the fledgling art form. Having introduced the notion of video on PDA to the world with his film festival, he is revving up for the sequel: The Massively Boring Film Festival. "The notion of a 1.5 x 1.5 inch black-and-white film without sound may seem extraordinarily dull, but the limitations of the medium can actually be quite liberating for filmmakers," he says. "It's all about transcending the tedium."