Mobile Movie Director, Big Plans Small Screen
September 14th, 2010 | by Mobile Data Group |By day, Jasper Kyle earns his keep as a gymnastic coach. At the weekend, he’s the director, scriptwriter and actor in Protocol Aye Aye, a short film about flesh-eating zombies shot entirely on a mobile phone.
The 22-year-old from Epping in Sydney has made seven films this year without spending a cent on production, and four of these have made it into the finals of Australia’s first competition celebrating films shot on a mobile phone.
Movies made for mobiles have become a popular entertainment by-product of the smartphone era, but the Mobile Screenfest competition goes a step further by only accepting submissions actually filmed on a mobile phone.
Kyle, who has recently started his own video editing business, believes filmmaking is in his blood.
“My uncle used to take us out to places like the Maritime Museum and we would then make a movie about the day out so I was almost doomed to do it,” he says.
Even so, he says if it were not for his love of apple Danish, he might never have taken part in the competition.
“I was coming home from partying in Sydney and when the bus dropped me off about 5am I was really hungry. There is this great bakery that does the best Danish pastries and they had one of the competition flyers on the counter. I picked one up and thought it was a really cool idea.”
Although he names Italian director William Labate (Domenica) and Australian director Alex Proyas, (The Crow, Dark City, Knowing, and I, Robot) as key influences, his leap into the miniature format was facilitated by a seminar run by US mobile movie expert Professor Karl Bardosh.
“He was talking about how the mobile phone can be used to shoot any genre but instead of using flashy bells and whistles like you might with an everyday camera, you have to be more creative in how you shoot.