'Archaeology of Mobile Film: Blink, Bluevend and the Pocket Shorts' in Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media

Bluevend: a Bluetooth-enabled film vending machine 2005

Watching film on tablets and mobile phones is now commonplace but just over a decade ago such experiences were still just an aspiration. In 2002, Nokia ran a ‘Future Applications’ advertisement featuring a woman sitting on a bus, watching a horror film on her phone. As she watches she gets more and more agitated, until in the end she lets out a scream and the ad ends with the tag line ‘One day you’ll be able to watch videos on your mobiles’.

Following cinema, television and computers, the last decade has seen the emergence of the ‘fourth screen’ and today watching films on mobile platforms has become a part of everyday life. Over this time there have been many initiatives to develop mobile film and whilst much of this material looks quite archaic now, it could be argued that these early prototypes should not just be consigned to a footnote in media history but should be regarded as the incunabula of new kind of film-making.  

In 'Archaeology of Mobile Film: Blink, Bluevend and the Pocket Shorts' in Compact Cinematics, Kim Walden (School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire) undertakes an archaeological exploration of 3G phone technology to examine the technical affordances for both film making and film viewing. In the light of this  she goes onto consider the first generation of mobile film and her contention is that such experiments with mobile film illuminate the antecedents of compact cinematic forms which have become prevalent today.

Published January 2017: 'Archaeology of Mobile Film: Blink, Bluevend and the Pocket Shorts' in Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media

Available in hardback and Kindle format: Here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compact-Cinematics-Moving-Image-Bit-Sized-ebook/dp/B01N68AJ1Z/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484664331&sr=8-1&keywords=compact+cinematics