Filmmaking is about the most expensive creative expression one can have. The cost to produce an independent film starts in the thousand dollar range for a short and just escalates to ridiculous levels. Say you coerce your friends into being actors and crew on your production for free; you still have to rent the camera, purchase 35mm film stock which costs about $80 a minute to shoot-you'll need about 25 minutes of coverage to get a good 5 minute finished edit. And all that is before you yell 'Action" Even the cheaper digital route adds up when you factor in cost of a camera, computer hardware plus software for your non linear editing bay and tape or DVD mastering equipment. This forces aspiring filmmakers of modest means (almost everyone) to choose between paying the rent or realizing their cinematic ambitions. But a Finnish mobile company wants to help you indulge your inner Spielberg for the just cost of a phone or as they are now calling it a 'mobile device'.

The new term is indicative of the desire of cell phone manufacturers to grow beyond the traditional definition of their product. As with most consumer electronics, the lifespan of cell phones followed a steep growth curve as people rapidly adopted the technology then a plateau as they stopped buying and kept using the same phone for a year or longer. In an effort to inject excitement into a stagnant of dollars market and provide an incentive to upgrade to newer models, cool features were introduced and the idea of cell phone as mobile multimedia entertainment device was born. First digital photos, then digital music, followed soon after by web browsing, hopefully leaving some room for calling capabilities in there somewhere. Apple's iPhone epitomized this trend. But even the much lauded iPhone falls short when it comes to one fast growing cell feature, capturing the moving image. Despite being the coolest smart phone on the market and boasting impressive screen size the iPhone lacks cam capabilities. Not the case with Nokia which is banking on video to garner it a nice chunk of the US market.

For its US push Nokia has tapped award winning auteur Spike Lee to direct a short film shot using mobile phones. Ok this is not entirely accurate, because the movie is essentially a collaborative project where the actual cinematographers will be John Q Public. Anyone old or young enough to figure their way around a cell phone can submit an entry to the website www.nokiaproductions.com where it will then be reviewed by the director and his assistants. They will select the best ones and Lee will knit those together to form a 3 act short film with each segment consisting of 3 to 5 minute acts. The completed film will premiere next fall in Los Angeles and be available for viewing online. Nokia has yet to determine which cell phone carriers will act as mobile distributor. The phone manufacturer hopes that having Lee at the helm will lend credence to the concept and steer it from the rocks of creative confusion. You know what they say about too many cooks in the kitchen. There is a loose creative brief involving humanity, birth and so on but it is really up to the participants to fashion their own entry and gage what others are contributing as well.

This brings us to the other major aspect of the Nokia film contest; social networking. Quite possibly the most over used phrase of the last two years, social networking is the new 'synergy' everyone utters it but few grasp the concept. User generated video has migrated from the web to the TV, infiltrating advertising; remember the Doritos super bowl commercial? So video on the third screen is a logical progression seeing as social networking powerhouses, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube have all staked a claim on the mobile frontier. Think of it as millions of tech savvy, snap happy consumers who eschew traditional mass media in favor of creating, editing and sharing their own content with friends. Nokia, as any multi-billion dollar technology player worth its salt is concerned with moving product and brand building. According to their commissioned study, by 2012 as much as 25% of consumers will produce and share their own content and the company wants to ensure some of it is made on Nokia phones-I mean 'mobile devices'.

The citizen journalist has been responsible for some of the most important and moving images of current events in the past few years, from 9-11 to the Virginia Tech massacre, chronicling history as it occurs via phones and posting the footage online or emailing it to television stations. The immediacy, ease of use and extreme portability of phone cams helped turn YouTube into a billion dollar website. Having the director of such films as 'Inside Man' and 'Do the Right Thing', view and critique the work of ordinary users will certainly be a drawing point and for his part Lee says he looks forward to working with talented creative people who have never been to film school. While no Oscar contenders may ever emerge from a mobile phone there is the possibility of a feature being made on such devices in the next five years and the Nokia project presents a chance to experiment with a rapidly evolving platform.

I am not surprised to hear Lee admit he can barely figure out the current phones. Take for example Motorola's Z10, a sleek looking kick-sliding mobile film studio that captures high-quality video, edit clips, inserts scene transitions, title slides and a sound track. Its 2.2-inch QVGA screen displays video at 30 fps in millions of colors, allowing users to view their own creations or downloaded content. It also has a slot for an external memory card up to 32GB. This is not your daddy's cell-phone. While studios are not going to be shooting their multimillion dollar productions on a kick-slider anytime soon, some are certainly open to exploring the mobile screen's exhibition potential. Rental giant Blockbuster is toying with the idea of movies to be viewed on cell phones and Sony Pictures Television in partnership with the largest mobile provider in the country, AT&T and MediaFLO USA has announced plans to launch the first ever mobile movie network. It will be one of two offerings on the new AT&T Mobile TV service in May. The new channel christened 'PIX' will feature titles from Sony's film library that have already made the cable, DVD and network rounds such as 'Ghostbusters' and 'Stand By Me'. They will run for a month with new additions introduced weekly. Other titles announced for PIX are 'Resident Evil', 'The Karate Kid' and 'Memento'.

In the US the third screen is seen as a marketing platform for theatrical releases, serving up promotional teasers and tidbits but is not considered an exhibition option in its own right. Sony wants to change that. They have had a go at it before being among several studios that contributed movies to MSpot which in 2006 launched MSpot movies with Sprint. Sony was also the first studio to make features available on memory cards. The studio is in talks with other possible mobile carriers for PIX and this means that pricing models could vary from one to the other. While AT&T may charge a fee for using the service another carrier could offer it for free but supported by commercials shown during the feature. One other possibility is to offer PIX as on-demand.

A major drawback to movies on mobile is the size of the screen or lack thereof. Even the iPhone which has one of the largest screens on the market is only 3.5 in diagonal. Some companies like Washington based Microvision Inc are developing projection systems to save you from squinting at a tiny display. These 'Pico projectors' work by shining red, green and blue lasers on a rapidly oscillating 1mm square mirror which then paints a picture line by line so fast that it blends into one image. They are currently small enough to be carried in your shirt pocket (size of two full sized iPods) but the goal is to shrink them down and make them affordable enough to be built into your phone or iPod yet powerful enough to project what is playing on your small screen onto walls, tables and other flat surfaces.

The Nokia film challenge follows in the footsteps of cell phone film festivals that have mushroomed in recent years. The premier showcase of mobile moviemaking in the country is the annual CellFlix Festival. It is the brain child of Dianne Lynch, dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. The contest challenges entrants to fashion a 30-second film entirely on cell phone. Texas Instruments which develops mobile technologies is a sponsor of the event. Other mobile film festivals have emerged as far afield as China and Toronto. Paris held its own festival last year sponsored by French mobile operator SFR and the Pocket Film festival in Yokohama, Japan featured entries from 18 countries in Asia and Europe. Japan is the mobile capital of the world; the ubiquitous devices are used for everything from surfing the net to reading novels and watching TV.

The notion of shooting then sharing plays into the social networking phenomenon that advertisers are eager to exploit. Producers upload material created on their phones whether video, music, photos or text online and visitors to the site can watch and combine entries with their own material. Material can be created and uploaded anytime from anywhere in the world, even from the Australian Blue Mountains which I recently visited. Cell phones promise to democratize filmmaking. Unlike traditional 35 mm, shooting on a mobile device is cheap, it needs no crew or craft services, the unobtrusive camera requires no permits and can go places an Arriflex or even a MiniDV cam dare not venture. It is simple and easy; even its most quoted disadvantage-low video resolution-lends an intimacy and artsy feel to the image. But one question still bugs me, one drawback I haven't figured out yet. What to do when you have staged a poignant, pivotal scene and right in the middle of shooting and immortalizing that moment on mobile the phone rings?