Next Level Mobile Film Making Using Cinematic Styles.
“A soft, diffused picture, a fantasy”, is how one of the world’s greatest cinematographers described his landmark film Wuthering Heights (1939) as DoP. The tones and shadows were reminiscent of expressionism.
Today, what would Gregg Toland, also behind the film polled by Sight and Sound as the greatest film ever Citizen Kane 1941, have made of this above?
It’s a test shot for a news film on the UK’s costs of living crisis. The phone sits in isolation, the light is bleak, compassion is far removed. What would Toland have made of this shot on a piece of technology that could only be dreamt up as sci-fi fantasy in his days? I can give a partial answer later based on Toland’s interviews.
Rob Layton, an accomplished mobile journalist, and Assistant Professor of Mobile Journalism (Mojo) at Bond University in Australia prompted this post after reading his report: Mobile Journalism’s new focus: the cinematic. His article asks from the basis of MojoFest 2022, whether MoJo has come of age and its implications.
I’d encourage you to read the piece to be immersed in his narrative in which he pulls on the work of experts and features comments from industry figures. Smart phones are going through further transformation ergo, Mojo has further heights to climb.
Beneath the Lonesome Skye, Layton’s first piece is beautifully shot and its cinematography speaks to one of the many facets of the cinematic. An interesting question I’ve often asked is how the cinematic (and cinema) has antecedents that influence or impact newer generations. Winton C. Hoch was the cinematographer for John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). There are references in Layton that remind me of Hoch’s work.
Layton is behind a contemporary practice he calls Cinematic Mojo or Cinemojo. He says in his article:
Since MojoFest ’22 (my other presentation was mobile workflows), my practice-based and academic research has focused on how to merge cinematic storytelling techniques with established mojo practices. For academic purposes, I’ve been calling it cinematic mobile journalism — cinemojo, for short.
He adds
The idea being that packages shot (and even edited) with mobile move beyond the standard run-and-gun or talking heads of everyday news gathering to embrace more considered and composed imagery that enhances and propels the story. Like academic David Gyimah Dunkley’s Cinema Journalism concept, this practice requires more time, telling, an artist’s eye and — perhaps most importantly — emerging and developing technologies.
Tagging my work in cinema journalism was a jump off point to comment on the article and also share further ideas.
I agree with Christopher Cohen, chief technology officer for the video camera app Filmic, that the novelty era is over. I offer this not as an isolated view, but for someone who witnessed and rode alongside mobile enveloped in cinema journalism.
Many cohorts within the form today know nothing else. They were born into a world of mobile, whilst a broad spectrum of mobile journalists originally emerged from video journalism or otherwise e.g. flip phones and beta cams i.e. using an array of cameras and capturing devices. Glen Mulcahy , Michael Rosenblum and RTE’s Philip Bromwell, are some of those OGs.
All forms atrophy and are recast inviting new actors to question the original incarnation. It’s a feature of music, literature, film and architecture over the centuries.
There are those that pioneer its language before it conventionalises, and then those that continually question its foundations and crystallised language before a new entropy jump. Innovation is continuous, but as the late Prof Brian Winston put it, there’s a supervening necessity fusing the intersection of culture and innovation that disrupts the form.
Layton, is signaling that he’s one of the artists looking to take it to the next level.
Cinema Journalism
Cinema journalism, as different from cinematic journalism, as an art form is agnostic to technical tools and cameras and as such its envelops several forms. It’s about the events inductively influencing the production process. Mobile is but one of those in the integration process.
I first used a mobile in 1994 as one of the UK’s first videojournalists.
But in 2003/4 in a series of future projects with the BBC, now as an academic-practitioner, we envisaged the world of mobile which was featured on journalism.co.uk and the online video magazine, www.viewmagazine.tv I created that won the Knight Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism.
Our concept of its future relied on the linear trajectory of thought that in 2006/7 Reuters would render it as viable. Nokia would crack it and so did Reuters. Here’s a video interview with ilicco elia ( mobile phone pioneer) when he was at Reuters. Fuller video here.
I’ve been a Royal Television Society juror for many years and one of the benefits of that is you see new ideas and technologies across your desk. This year I was a Google Innovation judge and there are equally interesting innovations in the works.
Back in 2011 the riots in the UK, and Tahrir Square uprising, were two major incidents in which mobile as filmic technology was cementing itself. A journalist from Sky captured rioters in London. In Egypt, where I was making a film, my friend Inigo Gilmore recorded Gigi who became the face of the Revolution.
A breakthrough doc in 2012 by Al Jazeera, Syria: Songs of Defiance | People & Power demonstrated that mobile phone filming was the future. In part its production was based around the idea of avoiding suspicion from the authorities that the shooters were professionals.
By now many videojournalists were pivoting to mobile and a new industry of kit, knowledge, forms, and speakers were coming together. One of the first was Glen Mulcahy who created the Mojocon Mobile Journalism conference in Dublin in 2015.
Mulcahy had extensive work with the Thomson Foundation and RTE. We’d first met in 2008. In 2015, on the eve of his big event, I invited him to share his ideas on a stage with me at Apple Regent Street where I was presenting on cinema journalism.
The invitation was reciprocated and I spoke at the first conference Mojocon, Mobile Journalism in Dublin.
The gathering of like-minded, particularly those heavily invested in the Mojo way amongst cohorts would yield a new roll call of talent. The building of the Mojo pedagogy continued unabated: 2016, 2017… and so on.
It was now settled within the broadcasting and film industry. The BBC that had originally been against portrait filming, now relented. In Hollywood film auteur Steven Soderbergh would shoot a whole movie on an iPhone.
Who needs an Arri when a phone can do much the same? It led me to conduct an experiment. Here it is. Spot which one of these is made with a mobile phone? Answer at the bottom of this post.
Amongst the films in this experiment posted in 2017 ( see here) was a short film Bass culture (2017) made for a colleague who’d secured £500,000 in research grant for the history of Reggae in the UK.
Despite the 500k budget there was no film budget so in a 4-day turnaround I made Bass culture (2017). The film was shown at the famous Regent Street cinema where the Lumieres screened their first film.
In India, after a journalism festival, to thank the organisers I made this, promo shot on mobile.
One of the central arguments I’ve made for Cinema Journalism (CJS) I’ve practiced over two decades, a doctorate and post doctorate work is the art of practice, which Rob Layton mentions.
Cinema journalism isn’t tied to any specific camera, though it emerged from the reflux of different mobile cameras in news from those with autonomy in the film process. It experienced entropy jump in the 30s ( in proto news) 60s, 90s, 2005 and 2019.
That doesn’t make CJ less or superior to Mojo. It’s just a different approach. Hence this below was my backpack on stories from 2017 onwards.
Now, I might gravitate to simply using the phone when the film calls on it. Yet I still sit within the practice of Cinema journalism. Like any art form, it generally takes more time to study, as acknowledged by Layton in his piece.
Yet many practitioners will claim how over time you develop a rolodex of approaches. There are several CJs I’ve come to know who are photojournalists cum video journalists and can work quickly and their work is spell-bounding like the extraordinary Raul Gallego.
Back to Gregg Toland, then who I mentioned at the top of this piece. What would he make of where we are? Chances he might say this from: Gregg Toland, ASC — An Enduring Legacy
“Forget the camera. The nature of the story determines the photographic style. Understand the story and make the most out of it. If the audience is conscious of tricks and effects, the cameraman’s genius, no matter how great it is, is wasted.”
Which may well have an equal application across mobile. The future will include the cinematic and cinema. Historical trends have shown this to be. Audiences crave greater immersion. But in ten years time, will the mobile phone be the camera par excellence? Remember all forms atrophy!
This publicity shot from the film Minority Report (available on Prime Video) gives a glimpse to the future. The finger gesture was for computing visualisation. But the laser spotting could be used to generate a frame field which could capture an image/s sent to a central server on your person ( phone watch) or elsewhere. Why?
Because another development in human endeavor is to be as frictionless as possible. Why hold a phone to your ear when an earpiece will do and you can utter commands to ring anyone you want. Why have a filmic device when you can do with pads on your fingers?
That’s a world away yet in the universe of Player One, Peripheral and Web 3. For the meantime the cinemaverse will do.
Answer. All of them were made on mobile with the exception of №5 — a film made by Travis Fox — one of the earlier pioneers of videojournalism who now specialises in Drone filming.
