Mobile Phone Video
Down the Bay, Is it?

Our final brief of the year was to create a 1 minute video specifically produced to be viewed on a mobile phone. The mock brief was to promote a youth magazine show called 'Is it!' based in Cardiff.

We had a day's refreasher in editing using Avid with Dylan Jones. It was great to get some more experience using Avid, but it's range of editing tools are not really needed when working with the limitations of current mobile phone technology.

Part of the brief was to ensure the final clip was under 1MB. To try to keep the file size down without losing too much quality we chose to use relatively still camera shots. We also avoided using any transitions and chose to stick to cuts. Aesthetically, we decided to use the style of 1950's British television documentaries. This was partly because we thought black and white video would keep the file size down and also because we wanted the style to clash with the modern mobile phone platform on which it is viewed.

We had a few technical difficulties trying to get the video out of Avid and onto a mobile phone. This was mainly due to the fact the version of Avid we were using was not designed to output to mobiles and therefore has no suitable codecs to compress the file and image size by so much. Stylistically we wanted to use a old film style plug-in, and decided to abandon Avid and export the edit to Apple's iMovie. This was no easy task though as the codecs used by each piece of software vary so much. After a couple of failed attempts at copying the file across, we opted to record back to DV tape from Avid and inport again into iMovie! Even then we had technical problems with some of the still photographs we had used. It was worth the effort though as despite the enormous difference in price, iMovie was far more suitable for exporting to mobile phones, (if you go into the Expert Settings under the QuickTime export option you can export to 3G or MPEG4). Eventually we managed to send the video via bluetooth to our mobiles. It was a fun brief and great to learn more about how to produce videos for mobile platforms.