There are two things I really love in this world.
- Whiskey
- Technology
You’d think it’s quite rare to be able to cross these two passions of mine, but I’ve done it once before and I just found another way to do it too. The 2019 Dublin Smartphone Film Festival takes place in the Teeling Whiskey Distillery, New Market on January 26. Here’s everything you need to know about it.
What is the Dublin Smartphone Film Festival?
First of all, on a personal level, I’m delighted to have Goosed.ie team up with the Dublin Smartphone Film Festival as a media partner for a second year. The festival sums up quite a lot of the reasons I founded Goosed. We love empowering people to do more with technology and the shooting Hollywood movies no-longer require dozens of expensive cameras is incredibly exciting. Just look at Unsane by Stephen Soderbergh, shot in 4K using an iPhone 7 Plus. Incredible! Anyway, back to the game at hand.
The Dublin Smartphone Film Festival, as you might have guessed, is a global showcase of short films shot using only smartphones and/or tablets. I went along to the inaugural festival last year and was blown away by the quality of flicks on show.
This year, straight off the back of an impressive first year, the festival returns, and it’s even bigger. There have been over 100 submissions of 15-minute movies show on smartphones from 25 countries. These films include a selection of short films, documentaries, animations and music videos and the festival will also feature an educational workshop.
Why Come Along?
I honestly cannot wait to go along to the festival again this year. Not only do you get to see some incredibly creative short movies shot on mobile devices, but you get to play with some awesome tech. I’ll be there with some of my favourite smartphones to shoot with, including the Google Pixel 3XL, Huawei P20 Pro and the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, our 2018 Phone of the Year. Feel free to ask me any questions at all you might have about them.
FeiyuTech will be on hand too with their remarkable gimbal range. If you don’t know what a gimbal is, prepare to have your mind blown by these things! Here’s a video I shot last year using a FeiyuTech gimbal to get an awesome steady-cam shot:
Alight Motion is a South Korean video editing app. To be totally honest, I’ve been shocked at how hard it can be to get a decent mobile editing app, but Alight Motion is incredible.
Other sponsors include Shoulderpod and LumaTouch but who knows what will appear on the day. I know I’ll be trying to sneak a whiskey at some stage anyway.
Beyond enjoying all that good stuff, there’s also some awards to be won. This is the Oscars of the smartphone filmmaking world and these categories will be crowned on the night:
- Best Fiction
- Best Music video
- Best Documentary
- Best Animation
- Best 360/VR film
Finally, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with the founder of the Dublin Smartphone Film Festival, Robert Fitzhugh, a few times and he really knows his stuff. With experience working on the Reel World Film Festival in Canada and more recently as part of the PR and marketing team for the Fingal Film Festival, he’s also sound out. Any questions you have about smartphone filmmaking, Rob will love to answer.
On running the second year of the festival, Rob had this to say:
“We just could not believe the success of the festival in its first year. We sold out before the doors even opened. It really demonstrated to us just how popular the notion of Smartphone Filmmaking has become. This year its been even bigger.”
On the growth of the festival, Rob stated: “We doubled our submissions and the quality in just one year has moved forward at a phenomenal rate. With Smartphone films like Stephen Soderbergh’s UNSANE (now part of mainstream cinema) there has never been a more interesting time to explore smartphone filmmaking. This is what the Dublin Smartphone Film Festival is here to do; to encourage the next generation of filmmakers to create their stories using their phones and to provide them with a platform to present these stories to a wider audience”.
I’ve Convinced You, Right?
It’s a lovely way to spend an evening, trust me. Now all you need to do is grab yourself a ticket for just €15.
The Dublin Smartphone Film Festival will take place in the Teeling Whiskey Distillery in New Market on January 26. It all kicks off at 19:30 (7:30pm) and runs till late!
Give Goosed.ie a follow on Twitter and you’ll see our run through of the flicks we’re most looking forward too before the big day.
