Lights, cell phone, action

"It's exciting. We were discussing this last year in film club," said Sasha Stefanova, an Ithaca College junior from Kazanlak, Bulgaria, who is majoring in photography and visual arts. As soon as she heard about Lynch's contest, "I went immediately to the dean's office and said, `How can I enter?' I love old films, and old-school techniques. The challenge here is how to get a meaningful idea into such an everyday tool."

Stefanova is still pondering her entry. She is traveling home to Bulgaria for the holidays and plans to shoot scenes during her travels.

"It will be about my generation's mobility and the falling down of borders," she said.

Sudhanshu Saria is a senior in filmmaking and likes the novel challenges presented by working with a cell phone and a 1- to 2-inch screen.

"There are definitely visual limitations. You have to be able to tell a quick story. You can't really make it character-based," said Saria, from Siliguri, India.

"With a super small screen, you can't have wide shots or crowd scenes. The images have to be visually simple. You can sustain closeups better than on a huge screen but some images may need to be exaggerated to compensate for the small size of the screen," Saria said.

Saria's initial reaction was that the contest "could be gimmicky ... But I hope people studying film will take it as my generation's chance to provide a new language, a new way of thinking."

The rules of the contest are simple.

There must be a story, a narrative and sound, and the film must be shot on a cell phone. The movies can be edited digitally on a computer or a cell phone that has editing functions.

The technical quality of the movies will depend on the cell phones, some of which can film with greater resolution than others. To ensure fairness, all submissions will be judged in basic VGA (video graphic array) quality, Lynch said.

The submissions will be reviewed by a panel of film students and faculty, who will select 10 finalists. Those entries — which can be viewed on the contest Web site — will be judged by a panel of faculty and professional filmmakers.

"The challenge is, can you capture an audience member's attention in 30 seconds and hold it an environment where not only is the delivery system small, but the time frame is short?" Lynch said. "Every single frame matters. There's no excess. That's an incredible discipline to develop."

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