Full-length film ‘Olive’ shot on a smartphone aims to hit theatres


30 Nov 2011

A full-length feature film titled Olive and shot on the Nokia N8 aims to become the first smartphone movie to be shown in theatres.

Olive was independently financed and has been posted on Kickstarter in the hopes of raising enough money to get it shown in more than 2,000 theatres across the US. It was shot with a Nokia N8, with a 35mm lens attached to it to give it a shallow depth of field.

The film is about a young girl that goes into the lives of three people and changes them without saying a word.

It stars Gena Rowlands, John Scurti, Chris Maher and Ruby Alexander. Mark Zuckerberg’s sister and former Facebook employee Randi Zuckerberg also has a role in the project.

The movie was directed by Hooman Khalili, who told TechCrunch he also wants to submit the film to be in the running for an Oscar.

This isn’t the first time the Nokia N8, with Carl Zeiss Optics and a 12-megapixel camera, has been used as a filmmaking device.

A short film called The Commuter was produced on the phone, which starred Dev Patel, Ed Westwick and Pamela Anderson. Nokia also teamed up with Wallace and Gromit makers Aardman Animation, for its short film Gulp, shot with the N8. Gulp set the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest stop-motion animation set.

Nokia has hosted a film competition called Nokia Shorts, which encourages filmmakers to use the N8 to film their projects. It offered US$10,000 as the top prize and all finalists’ films were shown at the 2011 Edinburgh Film Festival.