Filipinos bag amateur mobile filmmaker awards

TAKING the Nokia N90 mobile phone underwater in Anilao, Batangas was enough to convince the judges to award Filipino Janice Yu the grand prize in a recent competition for Asian amateur mobile filmmakers.
Another Filipino contestant, Pangasinan resident Noel Osting, won the "Best Editing" award for a short documentary on Filipino farm life.
Yu, who takes home a 10,000-dollar cash prize, was among the six finalists in this year's "First Time Mobile Filmmakers Award" organized by Discovery Networks Asia, a division of entertainment company Discovery Communications, and mobile phone manufacturer Nokia.
The contest requires contestants to use Nokia's N90 phone to shoot short films.
Yu's winning short film experiments with using the phone's video features to make a personal travelogue of one of the country's top dive sites.
"With the advancement of technology we have now, it is a godsend for videographers like me who can have immediate access to equipment that despite their small size, are packed with walloping features and quality," Yu says in her profile at the contest's website.
In her blog written for the contest, Yu said she was quite nervous about shooting underwater using the N90. It was a "make or break" moment for her, she said.
"I felt I've taken a gamble with the concept I chose," she wrote in her blog, as she looked back at the process of creating her short film.
Thai Ndol Lerkwsirisuk won the Best Visualization award.

Report courtesy of INQ7.NET - December 20, 2005