‘Smartfone Flick Fest’ (SF3) returns to Sydney in August for its second year. Keeping in line with the rapidly expanding apps and technologies of smartphones, the festival gives a platform for movies made only using technology available on these devices.
SF3 is the first smartphone film festival to come to Australia, but is popular around the world. Conceived by co-founder and festival director Angela Bourke, it was created to “give all film makers a way to tell their stories.”
“A good film is a good film, no matter what it is shot on. It starts in the story and then you add in the other elements,” she said.
“They say a good film is made or broken in editing and its true, the same thing applies to any phone film.”
The convenience of smart phones is giving short film makers opportunities previously limited to big studios.
“There’s so many amazing (apps) for free, and the most expensive I’ve seen is around $33 compared to the desktop software which are hundreds and hundreds of dollars, you can’t really compare,” Ms Bourke said.
Last year’s winner of the best film and actor awards, Steve McGrath, has used the technology to tell his stories.
“I’ve written a lot of scripts but I’ve made very few (short films) because I did not have the equipment,” he said.
“I’m a script writer and an actor so the first component was to get someone with a camera to make my films but because what you can do on a smartphone it was just so much easier.
“I could use a phone… and not be dependant on the people who had all the equipment.”
Festivals like SF3 encourage and support new directors to use social media to promote their work.
“There are so many ways to make a story these days. Particularly with Facebook heading towards more of a video platform, I think (social media) is definitely the way to get noticed, and film makers should definitely get onto it to promote their content,” she said.
SF3 coordinators hope to match or better the 500 entries in last year’s festival, and to see quality improve.
“We’re hoping that as smartphone film making progresses the quality and standard of the films keeps improving as well,” Ms Bourke said.
Video: Last years winning video ‘The LSD Man’ – produced by Steve McGrath.