Spike Lee may or may not have jumped the shark here, but Nokia's giving stuff away so it might be worth checking out. Film director Lee has teamed up with the Finnish handset maker to direct a film made with footage shot on mobile phones and uploaded to the Web. Lee was quoted as saying something about the "democratization of film," while bloggers like CrunchGear's Matt Hickey aren't so sure the move from HD to cell phone footage is really a giant leap forward for mankind:
In this, the day when anyone can own a hi-def camera and make decent looking cinema, Lee is taking it down a notch. No, this is down, like, 23 notches, at least. And maybe a rung.
At any rate, the film is being divvied into three acts, each of which will be driven by an "assignment" handed out at nokiaproductions.com. You'll have four weeks to produce a submission for each assignment, after which Nokia will pick 25 submissions to be featured on the Website. Viewers will vote the 25 down to a top 10, and Lee will choose one winner from that 10. The process will repeat for each of the three acts, and at the end we'll have a Lee-directed film based on the theme that music tells the story of humanity. Hmm.
The contest is open until August 21 and the film will premier later this year in Los Angeles. So fire up those cameraphones and head on over to the Nokia Production site for all the rules and details.
