Screen Dreams

The Age

Thursday November 27, 2008

Patricia Maunder

Patricia Maunder looks at how some local heroes are using mobile phones to screen their work.

SOMEONE walks up to you in the street and promises to tell you the name of the person destined to be your true love if you tell them your name and give them some small change. Chances are you would say thanks, but no thanks.

However, this same offer becomes a viable business model when mobile phones are the matchmaking medium.

It's just one of the many mobile services vying for your entertainment dollar.

As well as making our own fun with mobiles by sending an SMS, taking a photo or making a video call, we can also download music clips, songs, games, graphics, ringtones, sport and TV shows (some especially made for the smallest screen), as well as access the internet's entertainment options. And, of course, there are those novelty downloads such as the SMS matchmaker service and the video that turns your mobile into an "X-ray scanner" for when you want to be the clown of the party.

Who needs a TV when a small, lightweight tool that goes anywhere can offer all this?

The under-30s are lapping up this entertainment-on-the-go while baby boomers and gen Xers are more likely to buy a huge

flat-screen television and surround-sound system than use their mobiles for much more than phone calls and SMS messages. It seems many older consumers are still getting their heads around the things that mobiles can do.

Mobile phones ceased to be mere communication devices in 2001 when the third generation of mobile technology, known as 3G, was launched in Japan. Australia joined the fray in 2003 when Hutchison Telecoms, branded as 3, introduced a 3G network here, enabling mobiles to take advantage of much more than voice and text.

Suddenly mobiles could handle moving images and broadband wireless data. A phone loaded with that chunky, monochrome snake game no longer cut the mustard. And now that the iPhone has arrived in Australia you would have to be living under one of those old "brick" phones not to realise that mobiles have radically evolved over the past five years.

iPhones "are definitely a leap forward in terms of making the difference between a phone and an entertainment device a bit more blurred", says Doug Maloney, general manager of products and services at 3.

So where is all this entertaining content coming from? Like other 3G network providers such as Telstra, which introduced its NextG service in 2006, 3 has done deals with organisations such as Foxtel, Cricket Australia and major music labels in order to provide content for customers.

"Cricket's always been a great relationship for us to have and last year we had 1.2million viewers," Mr Maloney says. "We had about 1.65 million games downloaded and 5.5 million music downloads in the same period."

With numbers like these, it's not just the big players getting in on the act. Increasingly, mobile content is being made by musicians, filmmakers and other creative types who are looking for new avenues outside the traditional media.

There has been plenty of interest over the past few years in the pioneering forays by local filmmakers into live-action "snack TV" - programs made especially for the internet and the mobile phone such as Forget the Rules (available through Optus) and Girl Friday (Telstra).

However, there is a small army at work intent on providing entertainment for your mobile.

RMIT University's Bachelor of Arts (music industry studies) students have been creating MP3 ringtones as part of their course this year. "Ringtone sales and subscriptions now account for more than 10 percent of global music sales and it's a market that's growing dramatically each year", says RMIT music-industry lecturer Barry Hill.

"Downloadable digital music formats present exciting new revenue and marketing opportunities for musicians."

Meanwhile, a dozen animators around the country are hoping the Great Moments in History competition will give a new-media boost to their careers.

These 12 finalists received funding from Screen Australia (the federal body that supports Australian screen culture, including film and digital media) to create short, comic animations of two to five minutes suitable for computer screens and, in particular, mobiles.

The films are currently making their debut on 3G mobiles connected to Great Moments in History's corporate partner, Telstra, which will then offer them online at its Big Pond website. Anyone can vote after viewing a film and the winner will be announced next year.

"We have some enormously talented animation-filmmakers in this country with very few opportunities to promote their work," says Lori Flekser, Screen Australia's director of industry and enterprise.

She says the competition was established to promote that talent because mobiles lend themselves to viewing animation. "Telstra is always interested in short-form content that can work across mobiles."

One of two Victorian finalists in the Great Moments competition, Sal Cooper, submitted The Invention of Happy Hour, inspired by the old joke about a horse walking into a bar and being asked, "Why the long face?"

Creating animation that is effective on a mobile's small screen and speaker has its own special challenges, Ms Cooper says. Fast pans and detailed imagery, for example, are not effective. "You have to be a little more stylised," she says, and put an emphasis on bold colour and shapes, and focus on the story.

Animation for mobile phones "is a growth market", the animator says. "It's exploding because mobiles are becoming more and more sophisticated," she says, adding that the competition was the "push in the right direction" that she needed.

Harnessing that explosion is something that Tony Lay also wants to do as managing director of Iron Monkey, a Melbourne game studio he started five years ago just as mobile phone games began taking off. He launched his business on the premise that a mobile-phone game could be created by a much smaller team than required for console games and more quickly (turnaround is generally six months rather than two years).

He figured right, and Iron Monkey's first game, Samurai, was sold to Jamdat Mobile in the US. Although some console games are in development, the company's focus continues to be on mobile games, the most recent being based on the popular animated film Kung Fu Panda.

There is a lot of excitement in the mobile games industry about the size of the potential market, Mr Lay says. "There are pretty big forecasts. I think last year the (global) revenue was $2.6billion but only about 6 per cent of the market was downloading games."

He puts this down to a lack of understanding on the part of the average consumer about how to download a game to their phone and how much it will cost.

This should change with the iPhone, he says, as it makes downloading games as easy as downloading a song to an iPod. "I think the iPhone's probably going to do for the mobile gaming platform what the iPod did for the music industry."

Like Ms Cooper's animations, games for mobiles need a bold and simple visual style, but there are other challenges, such as the need to create different versions of the game for devices of different capabilities. Iron Monkey usually creates six versions of a game. After it's been sold to the publisher, it's then "ported" across to as many as a thousand different types of phones.

Foremost among the challenges is keeping functionality very basic while still keeping the player entertained. Mr Lay says. "All our games have to work just with one hand," he says. "Our simple test for success is whether you can hold a beer and play a game."

In other words it's truly mobile entertainment, something 3's Doug Maloney believes is rapidly becoming a reality.

"It feels like a lot of mobile services are right at the very beginning," he says. "What I'd really like to see are things that are exclusively made for mobiles so they're not just lifted off the internet, they're actually designed to complement people's needs when they're walking around the streets."

LINKS

www.rmit.edu.au/creativemedia/soundandvision/ringtones

www.screenaustralia.gov.au

www.ironmonkeystudios.com

www.bigpond.com/internet/offers/great-moments

© 2008 The Age

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