Much to my displeasure and exclusion from my trendier peers, I have yet to own a smartphone. The fanciest tricks my LG Chocolate Touch can perform are receiving e-mails and sending mobile uploads of my elaborate meals to Facebook (and even then, I have to go the traditional picture-messaging route).

Enter the iPhone 4, with its advanced photo-taking and video-recording capabilities and thousands of applications built specifically for the Apple platform — mine never stood a chance.

Last week, Korean director Park Chan-Wook, acclaimed for his cringe-inducing thriller ‘Oldboy,’ released a 30-minute film called ‘Night Fishing,’ which was shot entirely on the iPhone. Though the movie has been screened in theaters to reporters, it will most likely be made available for Web streaming in the near future so viewers can watch Park’s digital masterpiece on the very handheld device used to create it.

Though ‘Night Fishing’ is one of the first films of its kind — shot through a mobile device while still helmed by a major director and professional crew — it stands as a hallmark of the intersection between entertainment and the rapidly developing technology. For example, book deals from blogs, recording contracts from viral videos and the rising popularity of fully developed Web series’ are all signs that the talent that used to be concentrated within professional studios has now been distributed to anyone who owns a laptop and webcam.

‘Good content does not need to come from huge budgets, and we’ve certainly seen that in the film industry, going back to ‘The Blair Witch Project,” said Barbara Jones, a television, radio and film professor at Syracuse University. ‘At the end of the day, it’s all about storytelling.’

Quality content will trump superficial style any day, at least in terms of critical reception, a fact made evident by the increasing number of indie flicks up for nomination at the Academy Awards over, say, ‘Transformers 3.’ The previously beleaguered and financially draining process of making art is now more democratic, but that can risk diminishing the content itself.

‘The consumer world will always have an appetite for professionally produced content,’ Jones said. ‘Because of the nature of breaking news and the proliferation of mobile news-gathering devices in the hands of the untrained, the public is a little more accepting of that. But there will always be a place for a highly produced product in the entertainment world.’

Initial reviews of entertainment made from user-friendly devices like the iPhone, such as the Gorillaz’ latest iPad-recorded album ‘The Fall,’ will always place emphasis on the novelty of its creation and judge the project in that context. And though boundaries can only be pushed and progress only made through constant experimentation, finding a real gem out of the steady stream of lower-grade material coming through our channels will be that much more difficult.

All is not lost for the aspiring auteur, however. Many new minds — 333 of them to be exact — contributed to YouTube’s crowd-sourced documentary ‘Life in a Day,’ which premiered last Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival. The project has already garnered praise from industry critics for not just its innovative approach to cinema but for the gripping humanity displayed in the videos, each of which was taken July 24, 2010, by YouTube users around the world and uploaded to the site. Images of childhood, marriage and war seamlessly transition into one another, made all the more affecting because of their simple but stark reality.

In the end, whether it’s captured by a shaky video or HD camera, a good story can resonate through any medium.

Sarah Lee is a senior magazine major. Her column appears every Monday, and she can be reached at shlee10@syr.edu.

 

Published on January 30, 2011 at 12:00 pm