Experimental digital cinema: filmmaker with a camera-phone

Mobile phones with cameras are portable networked media devices that are ideal for capturing and sharing the ephemeral sights and sounds of our everyday experiences. But Camera-phones have also emerged as powerful media tools which can be used by filmmakers to construct hybrid cinematic forms. In this paper we set out to explore the potential of the camera-phone as a device to aid the production of visual media, with particular reference to a series of camera-phone films produced by the authors. Using Vertov's experimental film 'Man with a Movie Camera' (1923) as inspiration for this practice-based research, we examine how camera-phones may be adopted as tools for the creation of innovative visual experiments, which arguably extend our understanding of portable computing, place and filmmaking practices