It’s not the first film to be shot on a mobile phone but Nokia’s latest marketing push for its new flagship N8 smartphone is a good opportunity to take stock of how far camera phone technology has come.
The short film entitled ‘The Commuter’, which stars Dev Patel, Charles Dance, Ed Westwick and Pamela Anderson – yes, the Baywatch star of yesteryear – was shot in 720p HD entirely on the Nokia N8 over four days in London, plus plenty of post-production I’m sure.
It’s not clear what platform was used for actually editing the film, but although unlikely, in theory it could have been edited on the phone itself. Like the iPhone, the N8 includes a pretty easy to use video editor for trimming and re-arranging clips. Say what you will about the Nokia N8, which I’ve had in my possession for a few weeks now, if it was competing on its media production capabilities alone, especially for stills photography, it would be the hands-down winner bar none.
Its 12 megapixel camera is supported by a fairly large censor, Carl Zeiss optics and a proper Xenon flash. It’s just that pesky things like an outdated User Interface, sub-par web browsing and lack of breadth in third-party apps – those pesky apps – give it a bad name. That said, for those who are interested, I’d argue that the definite improvements to the touch version of Symbian 3 make the OS just good enough from a UI perspective. It’s not the deal breaker that some reviews have escalated it to. But I digress.
As for the film itself, let’s just say it won’t win an Oscar but I don’t want to spoil all the fun…
(Best to select the HD viewing option as, well, it was shot in HD.)
