One of the most grueling international challenges for filmmakers is the 48-Hour Film Project (www.48hourfilm.com). The contest dares movie makers to complete a movie on assignment in a single weekend and submit the results to judges and to a live audience almost immediately.
This weekend, one filmmaker relied on a Verizon Treo 700w to complete a film after his camera broke down just hours before the start of the contest. “It’s tough enough to complete a film in just two days,”said filmmaker Bill Dyszel, “but the idea that you’d try do something that difficult with a phone instead of a camera seems insane.”
Insane or not, Dyszel took up the assignment in the Portland, Maine edition of the 48-Hour Film Project and did, indeed, finish the assigned film. To top that off, his film arrived first among the 14 filmmaking teams entered in the contest, despite the fact that all the other teams used conventional digital video equipment.
How did he feel about shooting a movie on a Treo rather than a conventional video camera? “You’d be surprised; it really works,” he said, noting that once you learn to make a virtue of the limitations of the Treo as a moviemaking device, there’s definitely the potential to create all kinds of entertainment. “It’s not something you’d do every day,” he said, “but there are some unique advantages. A Treo is much less conspicuous than a video camera, so you can shoot without having people notice you. It’s also much faster to transfer footage from a memory card on the Treo than to capture footage from a typical video camera. Treo moviemaking is probably its own film genre because of its unique set of assets and limitations, but you can definitely do lots of entertaining things with Treo movies.”
