Genre Change

For this assignment we had to translate information presented from Anthony Funnel's ABC Media Report into a different form of media and for an appropriate genre.

The increasing popularity of 3G mobile phone content has led to people creating special TV and movie content specifically for the mobile phone. This content is better know as a ‘mobisode’, which typically lasts for only 1 minute (Jain, 2005). Because of the relatively short length of mobisodes, the content needs to be concise and interesting enough to keep the attention of the viewer.

With this in mind, I created a short 6 frame mobisode titled ‘George & The iPhone’ which was a translation of Antony Funnell’s media report. The mobisode features a story line of myself demonstrating the iPhone to George Bush, and extracting the appropriate material from Funnell’s report to match the story.

I decided to go for a political comedy genre, which the target audience would be people interested in politics, as well as new technology. The mobisode could perhaps be available to download from the ABC’s ‘Chasers War on Everything’ website, which the premise of the show is to look at wider issues of politics and the world in a light-hearted approach. This is supported by Jains (2005) notion of content personalization, where the specific user can decide what content they will receive.

The language in the mobisode is formal, but also plays on America’s way of calling mobile phones, ‘cell phones’. Because George Bush and John Howard are close acquaintances, the mobisode ties in Howard sending an MMS photo of himself to Bush’s phone, and Bush meeting his ‘boyfriend’ organised by mobile phone.

When designing content for mobile phone publication, it is good to keep text to a minimum and design information chunks that fit onto a small screen (Frick 2000). The text is quite large in proportion to the screen size of the mobisode. It features a regular Helvetica font written in big caps with a white background provided by the speech bubbles. The speech bubbles also assist in guiding the users eye around the screen, although this is not as big an issue when the screen size is so small. Helvetica is said to be the leading typeface across a multitude of codes and signals that enliven urban life (Müller, 2005). In this context it gives the mode a ‘comic book’ feel, which is appropriate for a mobisode as it creates movement and excitement when reading.

Overall I was happy with my Mobisode, and believed it faithfully presented the information from the Media Report into an interesting format.



Reference:



Frick, O 2000, WAP – Designing for Small User Interfaces, CHI 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands, viewed 30 August 2007, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=633395


Jain, R 2005, Media Vision: A true multimedia client, University of California, Irvine, viewed 30 August 2007, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/93/30741/01423942.pdf?tp=&arnumber=1423942&isnumber=30741


Müller, L 2005, Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, Translated by Catherine Schelbert, Springer, viewed 30 August 2007, http://books.google.com/books?id=6UHOApOVw2EC&dq=typeface+helvetica