French cineastes see big trend in pocket-sized moviemaking – Yahoo! News

by Marc Burleigh Sun Oct 8, 5:46 PM ET

PARIS (AFP) – For many of us, the latest mobile telephones on the market are simply cool gadgets for making calls, with a few nifty electronic extras — MP3, agenda, e-mail, image capture — tacked on.

But for a tiny yet growing number of artists and filmmakers, they are in fact amazingly small, cheap cameras

“Something is definitely happening with these. I was as surprised as anyone when I saw what I could do with one,” said Jean-Claude Taki, an experienced French director who has taken the new technology and run with it.

The ubiquity of mobile telephones and the increasingly sophisticated technology they contain mean more and more people who feel they have a filmmaker’s gene in them will be turning to them, he predicted.

“I don’t know if this tool will turn out to be a revolution. But I do know it’s not just a passing trend,” he said.