Ultrashort, low-resolution and anonymous: Designing anthropological films for smartphone viewers

A new kind of film has come into being, meant to be viewed on a smartphone: low-resolution, ultrashort, and often anonymous. The distribution of these ultrashort videos has become a topic of concern in India, where they are discussed as a venue of promoting violence against minorities. In this experience I consider the form of the smartphone film from the perspective of an anthropological filmmaker. I share three downloadable films of forty seconds each, which I created to engage the smartphone as an alternative venue of knowledge sharing about research, during a period of temporary immersion in the world of Graphic Design.