Watching Free Run, a blurry, vertiginous MTV-style short by London-based photographer Henry Reichhold, is getting the digital equivalent of a sugar rush. Just 76 seconds long, the stylised film shows a young runner vaulting over commuters, shoppers and tall buildings in London, set to a Vangelis-like score.
Free Run was shot on a camera-equipped mobile phone, as were about 150 other works screened recently at Japan's first Pocket Films Festival in Yokohama. Its brevity can't compare with the shortest film, which clocked a giddy 12 seconds, but visitors with time and patience could watch full-length features filmed with the gadgets. France, possibly the world leader in the new field of pocket movies, supplied several productions that stretched to a full 90 minutes.
The idea of shooting, editing and even screening movies on mobile phones may seem odd, but its proponents take it very seriously, citing its potential for free, intimate creativity. Reichhold praises the 'rawness and vitality' of the medium and calls the cellphone software now available 'revolutionary'.
'This has enabled people to control every aspect of the creative process, from editing to adding a soundtrack and text - and in many cases all this can be done just using the phone,' he says.
That rough edge and a fair share of indulgence were on display at the festival, which showcased 48 clips selected from 400 submissions from Japan. Some were produced literally on the run by people clutching phones as they whizzed through traffic or - as in the nine-minute Walkers - sped around Japan on a bullet train; others were made by amateurs who should probably get out of their bedrooms more.
But the best, such as Passerby, a witty experimental collage by Michiko Tsuda, overcome their grainy technical limits with a quirky inventiveness. The split-screen entry shows a couple filming themselves entering a washroom then meeting in the corridor and exchanging mobile phones.