viral video

It is been just about almost year since I inked the last ideas for the Pocketcine project and framed it around the idea of mobile viral videos, then pitched it to the committee considering Mobile Muse projects. At the time there was huge hype around video for the mobile phone. My project treated the mobile phone and its video capability as a new medium that Canadian artists should explore and exploit.

I am sorry about the hype because it made people think I was making movies for the phone. Thankfully the hype has died down considerably. The pundits who never believed in the arrival of the new medium point to the tiny screen and say "who would want to watch a movie on that?"

I was recently told by an associate that finding the formula for a viral video hit is a kind of holy grail among mobile video producers. But he doubted it could be done.

I agreed with him. It would be like finding the formula for the world's funniest joke. If everybody had the formula, then one's joke would be just as funny as another's. There would be no funniest joke.

However people do go to movies expecting them to tell well-known stories, some of them entirely predictable, like a Jane Austen novel brought to the screen. Hollywood churns them out. Obviously being a successful entertainment conglomerate involves other strategies besides storytelling, such as creative distribution deals and marketing.

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.