Curating mobile content

by Gerrie Smits

Realising the power of content MTV and Motorola created MTV Load, a project that combined MTV’s creative credentials with the then-fairly-new phenomenon of downloading and accessing video through your mobile phones.
We were asked to source, curate, license and commission anything that was funny, beautiful, strange, interesting enough for people to download.
So we scoured the world and ended up with something like 300 films, from Argentina to Sweden, from Canada to Hong Kong.

What we learnt:
- Working for mobile requires a different technical approach: close-up shots, no fast movement, forget about detail. That helped us when we later helped MTV launch.
- It needs a different kind of narrative. Short, direct, more one-dimensional stories. Although we did experiment with not-so-obvious pieces like the ones from Zeitguised. After all, it was an MTV project.
- There’s an enormous amount of people out there with lots of little fun ideas to tell. And even if it was a typical low-budget, high-profile project, people were keen to get involved.

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