Smartphone Filmmaking

Mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking is a global phenomenon with distinctive festivals, filmmakers and creatives that are defining an original film form. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice explores diverse approaches towards smartphone filmmaking and interviews an overview of the international smartphone filmmaking community. Interviews with smartphone filmmakers, entrepreneurs, creative technologists, storytellers, educators and smartphone film festival directors provide a source of inspiration and insights for professionals, emerging filmmakers and rookies who would like to join this creative community.

While not every story might be appropriate to be realized with a mobile device or smartphone, if working with communities, capturing locations or working in the domain of personal or first-person filmmaking, the smartphone or mobile device should be considered as the camera of choice. The mobile specificity is expressed through accessibility, mobility and its intimate and immediate qualities. These smartphone filmmaking-specific characteristics and personal forms of crafting experiences contribute to a formation of new storytelling approaches. Stylistic developments of vertical video and collaborative processes in smartphone filmmaking are evolving into hybrid formats that resonate in other film forms.

This book not only develops a framework for the analysis of smartphone filmmaking but also reviews contemporary scholarship and directions within the creative arts and the creative industries. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice initiates a conversation on current trends and discusses its impact on adjacent disciplines and recent developments in emerging media and screen production, such as Mobile XR (extended reality).

Max Schleser is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. He is also the Adobe Education Leader, Co-Founder of the Mobile Innovation Network & Association (www.mina.pro) and Screening Director of the International Mobile Innovation Screening & Festival. He has co-edited Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones (2014) and Mobile Story Making in an Age of Smartphones (2019), and edited journals for Ubiquity, the Journal of Pervasive Media and the Journal of Creative Technologies. He conceptualised and conducted digital storytelling workshops for a number of city councils in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. His industry consultancy includes projects for Adobe, BBC, Nokia, Frontier Strategy and Open Lab, among other agencies and production companies.

Max’s experimental films, moving-image arts and cinematic VR projects are screened at film festivals and exhibited in galleries and museums (www.schleser.nz). His community engaged documentaries are broadcast on TV and online (https://www.behance.net/maxschleser).