Presented at the "Digital Film" seminar of the 2003 Antelope Valley Independent Film Festival by William Ross (billr@seanet.com)

The Atomized Audience

Every cellphone tells a story - will your story be one of them? 

Part 1. A New Venue Creates a New Audience 

The New Mobile Handheld Entertainment 

Movies have made the move to the smallest screen - that of your cell phone. The Tampere Film Festival in Europe and BigDigit.com's World's Smallest Film Festival in the United States showcased movies made specifically for viewing on mobile handheld devices such as cellphones and PDAs. A number of recently-announced products are also bringing movie and TV entertainment to the mobile handheld environment. Nintendo, Nokia, and Nickelodeon are all releasing handheld products that combine interactive gameplay with the ability to view familiar TV cartoons and movies. These new handheld devices, along with wireless Internet access via Wi-Fi and 3G cellphone technology, will bring about a revolutionary transformation in the viewing experience and usher in the age of the Atomized Audience - a mobile audience completely free of any constraints in time and space. 
 

The Atomized Audience and a New Venue 

The forerunners of the Atomized Audience are emerging around us today: the airline passenger watching a DVD on a portable player, the club-goer downloading the ringtone of her favorite song to her cellphone, the businessman watching a few minutes of CNN on his wireless laptop at Starbucks. 

Their experience, however, only hints at the unprecedented entertainment opportunities available to the Atomized Audience; opportunities provided by the advent of lightweight, inexpensive, handheld devices which are always on, and always connected to a vast repository of entertainment via a ubiquitous high-speed wireless network. The Atomized Audience is defined by its ability to obtain entertainment Anytime, Anywhere, and On-Demand. 

These new tools will not only bring about the Atomized Audience, they will also create a new kind of venue that differs markedly from our familiar experiences in a theater or home setting. This venue is so different that a content-development strategy based on the simple repurposing and reformatting of existing movie and TV products for the mobile handheld venue is ultimately doomed to failure. A new visual storytelling strategy, one specific for the unique attributes of the handheld mobile venue, must be employed to make the content worth consuming and the devices worth buying. 

These unique attributes become apparent when the viewing experiences provided by the theater and mobile handheld venues are compared. The familiar theater experience consists of a large group of people, mostly strangers, who share the common purpose of viewing a specific movie. They have all made a commitment in time and money (tickets, parking, baby sitters) to attend this specific screening of this specific movie. They congregate at a scheduled time in a building specially-built for movie viewing. 

At its core, theater-going is a social event. Sharing a common viewing experience with a group of strangers validates that experience, lowering inhibitions towards showing outward signs of emotions such as laughter and crying in public, and providing the participants a more fulfilling and visceral engagement with the story being told. 

In contrast, the typical mobile handheld experience - exemplified by the airline passenger watching a DVD on a portable player - will be that of a solitary viewer surrounded by strangers who are not sharing, or perhaps not even aware of, the private viewing experience taking place. The time commitment is minimal, with the viewing being squeezed in between other, more important, activities. The viewing can take place anywhere - in a seat on an airplane or in a car stuck in traffic. 

The mobile handheld experience is an asocial one. Any interaction by the viewer with a non-viewer will be viewed as an interruption and a degradation in the viewing experience. Without the validation of a group sharing a common viewing experience, the mobile handheld viewer is unlikely to laugh or weep out loud in public. 

The most radical difference, however, is that of control. While the theater-goer is a passive recipient of the images and sounds delivered in an unrelenting linear sequence by the filmmaker, unable to even leave their seat to go to the bathroom without missing part of the movie, the Atomized Audience has complete control of how the content is presented. This viewer has random access to the entire movie and can stop, restart, rewind, zoom, and play the movie frame-by-frame. 

To summarize, the unique attributes of the mobile handheld venue are those of Privacy, Low Commitment, Interruptibility, and Assertiveness. 
 

The Constrained Filmmaker and New Visual Storytelling Techniques 

While the Atomized Audience becomes less constrained in time and space, the filmmaker targeting this audience becomes vastly more constrained. Not only must the filmmaker sculpt the movie to fit in smaller screens, but the movie's content must also be engaging and compelling enough to overcome the constant stream of interruptions competing for the viewer's attention as well as provide an unprecedented amount of viewer control of the experience. 

These constraints require a distinct style of visual storytelling that addresses the unique attributes of the mobile handheld venue. A Procrustean strategy that "scans and crams" existing content into a handheld format will not provide an experience engaging enough to drive the widescale purchase and adoption of mobile handheld devices. 

Luckily, there already exists a set of visual storytelling techniques that we can exploit and adapt to this venue - those used by handheld games such as the Nintendo GameBoy. Although constrained by small, low-resolution screens with a paltry few hundred colors, low quality sound, and miniscule data storage, game designers have nonetheless been able to craft characters and stories enthralling enough to sell millions of units. 

Filmmakers hoping to thrive in this new venue must learn and leverage the techniques used by these game designers in order to deliver mobile handheld entertainment that is as effective and captivating as anything shown in a theater. 
 

Part 2. New Story Telling Techniques For a New Audience 

This section is forthcoming.