the-phone-book Limited is a New Media Arts Agency best known for exploring mobile phone content creation since 2000. Working across a range of projects involving artists, writers, animators, film-makers & educators around the world, we have built a strong reputation for innovative collections, ethical practices, and generous educational strategies. Our open submissions, direct commissions & education programmes stimulate innovative creativity across diverse communities - including festivals, arts organisations, media centres, businesses, local groups and educational establishments in 15 countries.

Ben Jones (Creative Director) & Fee Plumley (Production Director) are curators, consultants, educators & facilitators of creative technical projects using mobile phones. We try to keep most of our projects in-house, managing an outsourced team of trainers, project managers, developers, constructors and vocal artists as required for the delivery of our ideas.

As the-phone-book’s Creative Director, Ben provides an incessant supply of innovative projects and an enthusiastic approach to education and production. When not engaged with mobile phone projects he freelances in Animation as a Lighting Cameraman on productions including Bob the Builder, Pingu, and Rubberdubbers. Sometimes he returns to Live Action sets for Welsh Film-makers Cro Productions following a past life in short films, features and adverts including ‘The Parole Officer’ and ‘24 Hour Party People’.

Fee Plumley is the company’s Production Director, doubling as technician, curator, consultant and educator across the breadth of new media arts, with a core specialism in emerging technologies from webcasting to mobile phones and a background in Theatre. A natural communicator and passionate public speaker Fee engages with diverse communities, fostering critical debate surrounding emerging art-forms, distribution platforms and ethical practices.

mo:life
Can you tell us what you are up to in Australia?

Fee Plumley
We’ve just completed a train-the-trainer course in Perth where our participants went out to run their own outreach sessions during the Awesome Youth Arts Festival (see www.awesomearts.com for festival info, and www.0872.biz > txtA for some of the workshop outcomes). We’ve just arrived in Adelaide and are about to run two more events here, a one-day overview of the Creative and Educational opportunities of the mobile platform for Education AU and another more intense 4 day Train the Trainer

Masterclass for ANAT’s community at Flinders Uni. Then we go on to Sydney where we intend to have a bit of a holiday. We always try to have a bit of time to explore everywhere we go, but there isn’t usually the chance. This time though we’re here for Christmas and New Year which is very exciting, especially as it’s snowing lots in the UK!

mo:life
This is your last educational tour, do you have plans to do other things in the mobile sector? What’s the future for the Phone Book Ltd?

Fee Plumley
There is a tendency to only really consider multimedia arts within a digital environment, whereas we believe multimedia covers all media - many media, if you like - be that painting, sculpture, photography, performance, etc. To that end, from 2006 we will begin again to integrate these disciplines within our practice, and no, these won’t always be mobile focused!

Watching mobiles grow from green-screen to streaming media has been a fascinating journey so far, but it’s important for a creative organisation to continue generating new ideas and new journeys, both for ourselves and for the communities we inevitably go on to work with. The fantastic result of our recent Train the Trainer Masterclasses is that we have left a legacy right here in Australia: a fabulous network of experienced mobile experts - and if anyone wants their details, just contact us (team@the-phone-book.ltd.uk) and we’ll connect you!

mo:life
What has your global, and ground-level experience of mobile content creation taught you about what will and won’t work in terms of mobile video?

Fee Plumley
1. As a creator - Don’t believe the hype. When people tell you “Oh No. You can’t do that” just smile and nod, and then go and try anyway. What didn’t work for them (or their market) might work perfectly for you (and your market… or audience!).

2. As a commissioner - Take care of your talent - if you treat them fairly (which means pay them well and protect their interests), they will not only stay with you, they will bring their equally talented network along with them. Tell the truth - if you don’t know all the answers they will produce much more innovative results by finding things out for themselves than if you give them false boundaries.

3. As a developer - Keep looking for new tools, and keep pushing the boundaries of old ones. Celebrate breaking technology (not throwing it out of a window, but pushing it so far it crashes). Redundant technologies still provide valuable lessons, and there are a lot of people out there using ‘the old brick’.

4. As a seller - Creating a local consumer mass market is not as important in the long run to creating an international niche market (”Niche is the new Black”). Be responsible when listing your prices: the carriage will be in addition to your product’s cost, and if your consumer gets stung by their network provider, they won’t come back to you.

5. As a viewer/user - Bluetooth rules! Remember you can always bluetooth to and from your phone for free, there are ways to avoid those carriage costs!

mo:life
Styles of film and television are very different from country to country, have you noticed regional grammars emerging in mobile content?

Fee Plumley
Actually, we’d say styles of film & TV are very similar from country to country, all major broadcasters believe we all still want to watch the same things everywhere! We travel a great deal because of the- phone-book (it’s one of the biggest perks of our job!), and it’s amazing how many times we see the same shows, time after time. There’s way too much homogeneity in broadcasting and that is a creativity killer. We believe a ‘new’ distribution platform deserves a new type of content - made specifically for the platform, the user, and the time and location - not re-appropriated existing rubbish that we’ve all seen and heard way too much of.

New audiences (or consumers, depending on which way you choose to work) are much more intelligent than broadcasters would have you believe. That’s why the internet - being a two-way communication device - has changed the way people function internationally. Mobiles these days are really just internet tools, PLUS! The interesting content comes about when the technological limitations are seen as a creative challenge. Creatives now have to return to old-school grammars, to traditional creative processes: The Zoetrope was a one-to-one broadcasting device, the Cinema a one-to many, TV moved into one-to-few, and the internet and mobiles allow for the viral - one-to-one-to-one… Broadcasters need to accept this or they’ll miss out; the communities doing the exciting things are already happily getting on with it without them.

mo:life
As a extension of the last question, are you seeing real mobile- specific forms of content emerging? Can you sense a literacy emerging among content makers?

Fee Plumley
No, we’re not - which is actually a really good thing when you consider the time Cinema and TV have taken to evolve. In order for us to truly explore this new platform - and extensions of it - we need to take the time to consider the effects and potentials of each new evolution. Vive la difference!

mo:life
What constitutes good mobile content?

Fee Plumley
Bespoke design: suitable for the platform, the user, and their time/ location. Sometimes the same information can be delivered in different ways, according to the needs of the user. This is all about profiling and scalability. Fee is database obsessed, so the developments in XML are really exciting for us as they allow for the user to truly personalise the type and timing of the data they need throughout their day.

mo:life
What are your thoughts on the mobile search battle between Yahoo and Google? Do you have any predictions or suggestions for search models?

Fee Plumley
This all comes back to XML. In the same way that a well designed website can look good on a mobile’s minimal web browser or an i-mode browser, well constructed databases can be interconnected. However this is where it gets tricky because while we believe in the suitable connections between databases, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all… so we’re not so sure where we’ll end up here. We also think that sometimes it’s those random addresses that you make up based on assumptions that lead to more interesting results than simply entering a keyword (and don’t get us started on the so-called “walled gardens”!). Just please someone stop AOL using those absurd keywords and then telling everyone how they’re making the internet ‘easy’!

mo:life
Have you seen any good examples of multi-platform content adding to and extending film or television formats and/or narratives?

Fee Plumley
Definitely not in Television. Sadly broadcasters seem to believe we need to hear the same sad gossip from Big Brother on our mobiles and in our web pages, or - gasp - that we too can help “talent” get spotted by spending vast amounts of money in voting systems.

However, Independent Film and Theatre are a whole different ball game! I guess because they’re not tied in to the broadcaster’s standard contracts (which again stifle creativity as they relate to an entirely different product), Independent’s are free to push the boundaries much more. One example is the recently Award-winning Welsh production, “Textual @traction” by Fiction Factory, a short film written and directed by Leuan Morris and produced by Fizzy Oppe. It tells the story of how a series of passionate messages to a lost mobile phone inadvertently brings two gay men to declare their love for each other. In the cinema, members of the audience can receive the most important text messages on their own mobile phones if they register their number when they enter the theatre. The film can also be seen on the internet and again users can receive text messages on their own phones.

Our favourite Theatre example goes back to 2000, during the fabulous Edinburgh Festival when the Unlimited Theatre Company used SMS to promote its play, Static, at the Pleasance Theatre. Sections of the script were edited down to160 characters and used as short teaser pieces, aimed at enhancing the performances and adding new insights into the characters’ lives. More than 400 people subscribed to the week-long project - no mean trick for a piece of fringe theatre. This was incredible because for an unknown play, the audience entered the venue with an affiliation to one or more of the characters.

And of course the new media arts world is littered with innovative uses of mobile phones, but that’s probably for a different audience…

mo:life
We’ve asked this question before, but it’s worth asking again - what is the fate of mobile video? We seem to be at a stage where big players are hurriedly panel-beating the television model so as to squeeze it in to the mobile screen - do you think there’ll be space for independent players to push their own fare through, or will they have to find a channel and/or aggregator? In other words, in terms of video, do you think we’ll have a mobile-net where audiences seek-out content provided by all manner of producers, big and small? Or will we have something more like mobile-tv, a more push model that mirrors existing models, and draws on people’s av literacy - finding what channel you like and leaving the details to programmers?

Fee Plumley
You just need to look at Korea to see that actually people are already watching TV on their mobiles, and they seem to like it! In Europe we’re starting to see streamed content to 2.5G phones as well as the 3G broadcasts, but certainly in the UK we are so regulated by OfCom that the industry moves slowly. This is good! It leaves room for the Indies to tighten their grasp!

A common misunderstanding is that you need to be affiliated to a telco or aggregator in order to distribute content. This is simply not true - they may have access to a mass market, but it’s probably the type of pre-conditioned market you don’t want as an Indie. You probably already have an audience base, so promote ‘locally’ (not geographically, but within your network) and start by giving content away to show them what’s possible first, before eventually charging small amounts and sharing those profits with the content creators - your community, who will be your creators and your audiences. A small, self-managed fee-per-view from an international community will earn you more in the long run than a trickle income from a single country’s market, especially after the telco’s or aggregator’s have taken their cut and pushed you to the wrong market. We’re also big believers in Creative Commons as a new form of Copyright control, so expect developments from that direction.

Above all, share your discoveries. The world is too full of people who believe power is achieved from controlling data. The true potential of New Media / Multimedia is that everyone uses data differently, so by sharing it you gain more power and recognition than you would by holding on to it!

Fee and Ben are in Adelaide until December 15th when they move to Sydney for a month. Contact them on team@the-phone-book.ltd.uk, especially if you have vinyl you’d like to swap for one of the-phone-book.com’s DJ scratch battle tools!