Fun Little Movies produces short, fun movie clips available to mobile phone subscribers. In Gagsters kids play practical jokes on adults.
Fun Little Movies was the first American mobile channel to specialize in original, live-action comedy content. The latest Fun Funny Phone films include the science fiction parody Spacey Movie and The MiniBikers, where little people on little motorcycles fight crime a little at a time. Fun Little Movies has previously produced films for networks including HBO, Showtime, CBS, PBS, Comedy Central and MTV.

Frank Chindamo, founder and President of Fun Little Movies, says humor has played a central role in his life.

"When I was a kid I had more comedy records then music records. I was listening to George Carlin and Bill Cosby the way my friends would listen to Stairway to Heaven," Chindamo says. "I have always been fascinated by comedy and I grew up in a really rough neighborhood in New York. I was short and had a big nose so I had to learn how to defend myself. I couldn't do it by fighting so I learned how to do it by making the tough guys laugh. And I made it out alive, which some of my friends didn't."

Chindamo started out by writing and producing comedy pieces for cable TV networks, various internet sites and later on for palm pilots. In 2003 he was approached by the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) to put films on mobile phones as an experiment for the CTIA wireless fair in March 2003. That was the first public viewing of video on a mobile phone in the US.

In 2004, Chindamo was working as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California teaching short film screenwriting. At one of his presentations for The Mobile Media Institute he met Brian Barrett, from operator Sprint, who wanted Fun Little Movies to start up a channel at Sprint.

A variety of shows
The channel currently includes a variety of shows for kids and adults. Each film is about two to three minutes long and people subscribing to the Sprint video service are also offered a free preview. Fun Little Movies is paid per subscriber by Sprint, which also offers a range of established brands, such as CNN, Fox Sports and ABC News.

"For kids we have a show called Puppet Greetings, which is really funny puppets saying really funny things," Chindamo says. "There is also a show called Gagsters, where little kids play practical jokes on adults. It has been really successful with us and it also ran on the Warner Brothers network.

"For adults there is new episode of  ?Spacey Movie,? a parody of science fiction shows such as Star Trek and Star Wars. Here, the ship is not the Enterprise, it?s the Consolation Prize. We are filming live actors for the faces of the characters and putting them on animated bodies and in animated space ships. So it looks really, really cool."

Present at lots of different venues
Chindamo says it is quite different to work with films for a mobile audience. "It kind of reminds me of the original motion pictures because you can't count on the audio coming across or that people are able to see on the screen if you cut away very quickly, or if the object is small on the screen," he says. "So you have to do it a little bit more like in the vaudeville genre or silent movies. You have to stay on the joke a little bit longer, and play the joke a little bit bigger. You also can't do a lot of fast MTV-like cutting."

Fun Little Movies recently started worldwide distribution through Mobile Streams, which is distributing mobile video content in 25 countries. Mobile Streams sells the films on a per download basis, and in most cases it is branded as Fun Little Movies.

In addition to mobile phones, Fun Little Movies is also present at lots of different venues, such as the Microsoft Portable Media Center and other Windows Mobile devices. The company also has a contract with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which includes exclusive distribution of ABC?s mobile comedy shows on mobile phones in the US. The corporation in return distributes Fun Little Movies films in New Zealand and Australia.

"In the future I hope we can work more and more with advertisers and sponsors, because the films are very expensive to make," Chindamo says. "This is not stand-up comedy or pointing a camera at a news reporter getting free content. We are co-producing most of our content and producing original content ourselves. For example, for our show Love Bytes, our sponsor is people2people.com, which is a worldwide internet and mobile dating service. They?re a perfect sponsor for a show about mobile and Internet dating."

Fun Little Movies will soon start to work with companies for partnering with advertisers. "We hope to have a long and fruitful relationship with them,? Chindamo says. ?Hopefully it will give us a much higher budget and bigger stars for our films.

"Now we are on the internet, web portals and handheld devices, covering pretty much every possible way to see a film except for TV. Next month we might be showing our films on calculators," says Chindamo with a laugh. "If I see a hand held device with a screen, I want it to play Fun Little Movies!"

Hendrik Bergst鮼/EM>