What's different about video stories for mobile phones?

Multimedia content doyens are wracking their brains for more profitable distribution methods for TV and film - methods that will avert piracy, allow audience behavior tracking and restore the 30 second ad spot's revenue generating potency against fragementing audiences. But while the producers struggle to deal with technology changes, the content creators are feeling their way towards a new "science" of content - one that allows the interactive, mobile and small-screen nature of the contemporary world to actually change the nature of the stories that are told. Netvideo recently spoke with the Managing Director of one such company, the UK's Magic Lantern. Its MD, Anthony Lilley (pictured right with Netvideo's Jason Romney), is a former theatre director and lawyer. Today, he is MD of one of the world's most imaginative and prolific new media content creation companies. One example of Magic Lantern's work is the FourDocs video upload server that allows documentary film makers to upload and thus distribute and monetise their 4 minute works via Channel 4. But as well as providing business smarts and corporate leadership, Lilley hugs the coal face with his company's content producers and dreams up actual content projects.

In this interview, Anthony Lilley talks about his company's new formats and story types, developed specifically for the mobile, small screen world. He profiles work on the BBC drama Spooks and children's TV properties. But he says the famous children's books in the 1970s and 80s where the reader would reach the end of a paragraph and decide whether the character would turn left or right, were the mere early "cave paintings on the wall of interactive media", compared to what is coming. "The narrative form of interactive media is not film with clicks in it, it is actually a whole form which is centred on the user being in charge of the experience," Lilley says."That is related to, but different from, a traditional cathartic and Aristotelian narrative, where things happen to other people...It is always on the boundary between forms where the creative things happen."

In this interview, Lilley speaks about interactive narrative, in games, in machinima and in the world of mobile. Although the sun was setting (and Netvideo apologises for the interview's inexorable dimming), Anthony Lilley provides one of the most lucid and fascinating accounts of the specific, practical issues that film makers face when they make the transition to mobile phone video.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Storytelling
• mobiles
• video
• UGC