Cecil B. DeMille Severely Edited

When I first saw “The Annoying Thing” playing on a cell phone screen I realized I was witnessing the birth of a new medium. It is comparable to early Hollywood films, like “The Virginian.

The Virginian was DeMille’s first solo effort, a film based on a novel. I found it showing  on the Turner movie classics channel last weekend and watched it for about 45 seconds. It was like watching an elephant dance…amazing for its time (1914) but pretty crude and heavy-handed seen from a  contemporary perspective. Apparently film critics consider it a magnificent failure as well.

It is 51 minutes long and cost just over $17,000 to make. DeMille of course would go on to make extravaganzas, lavish epics that made DeMille’s name synonymous with big screen, big budget films.

“The Annoying Thing” (you can view the web version at http://www.turboforce3d.com/annoying/) is slick, fast and has probably been seen and lauded by more people than saw the Virginian. DeMille had to settle for a small percentage of the $111,000 that Paramount grossed when the movie played in movie theatres. The Annoying Thing was released as a viral movie on the web free.

Rather than being played in a large dark theatre with an audience in a zombie-like trance, Annoying is played in the palm of your hand in noisy places and shared among friends and associates.

The really amazing thing is that Annoying is only 42 seconds long and 700 kilobytes in size. It packs a heavy punch for being so small, no small testimony to the cleverness of its creator.  It probably works so well because it has almost a hundred years of film-making embedded in it. And its director, Eric Wernquist, is a talented artist and storyteller. The software "studio" he used to make it cost about $1500 (LightWave). He got some help from a talented voice artist and a gifted musician.

The age of pocket cinema has arrived with Annoying. Annoying really does work on the smallest of screens and in the places where it shines: coffee shops, airline terminals, commuter trains and dentists offices. Every time I have shared it, it has produced a laugh and a face replete with delight. It has entertainment value.

Short, that is very short, digital video has become big. YouTube, which was founded a year ago by a couple of geeks working in a bare office over a pizza parlor, got about 22 million visitors last month. Annoying has very high production values, which distinguishes it from the vast majority of viral videos you see at sites like YouTube. That is certainly accomplished by the quality of the software and the depth of the artistry. But it is also made possible by the very nature of the medium. Annoying plays on 176x144 pixel screens. Wernquist did not need a lot of hardware or time to render it and he did not have to fill a large screen with content.  It is short, much shorter than television shorts…only 42 seconds long. Not a lot of time to fill with content. And because the file size is only 700 kilobytes, he played out the action on a bare stage with a single actor.

Wernquist let it go on the viral net and must have regretted letting it go free. It became a global hit. He has since tried to merchandise it and spin it into a television series. But it is too late. It has flashed and died away. DeMille created a movie studio in a barn for $20,000 with some partners and proceeded to help feed theatre chains with blockbuster films. Releasing viral videos on the Internet for free does not have a business model, it is at best a creative release for artists working full time at a games factory.

Of course the movie studios and television producers are all over mobile video as a channel for releasing content. But are people really that interested in watching a full-length movie on a 2 inch or 6 inch screen? I’m not sticking around to find out.

When DeMille released his early films, he had no choice but to sell them to the large movie studios because they owned the theatres. Mobile moguls have had to face a similar situation in distributing to mobile phones. The carriers have controlled distribution from their deck and taken the lion's share of any profits to be earned from mobile video. Apparently that is slowly changing in Europe, and it will probably happen in North America. People will eventually be able to download content to their phone from anywhere.

That is going to set the stage for new and innovative cinema on the small screen because producers will be able to experiment with new business models. I am betting that mobile entertainment is going to be supported by ad revenue, so the model will be closer to television than the movies.

That's going to attract talent from the huge games market. Somewhere out there, toiling at a desk in a games company is somebody with an unbearable urge to innovate on his or her own terms. 

Pocketcine' aims to find the genius whose name will eventually become synonymous with the 45 second, tiny screen epic.

One of the ideas we have been experimenting with is serialized content that is ad supported. Sort of a viral video with a 5 second ad trailing it. We have "after dark" artists working right now to test that idea. I would say “stay tuned.” But if my small band of artists are successful, you won’t have to find us, we’ll find you.