In my project, aimed at teenage girls, I build a series of animated movies for mobile phones. The movies address issues that women in this age face. Body image, self-knowledge and sexuality. The users download a flash file or receive it via MMS. They need to be 4 players, each of them having a quarter of the full image on their screen. When four girls hold their mobile phones up simultaneously they can watch the whole piece together. Their separate screens function as one larger screen synchronized via bluetooth. It involves the challenge to bring a group together and encourages dialog amongst the users. At the end of each animation they are offered to choose between two options of how the story will go on. Right after voting for the next part they continue watching the clip on their phone.

Again, each of them has only one part of the animation, they have to find the right positioning of the phones similar to a puzzle. They have to stand close and find the right angle between the phones in order to see the complete animation. The sound of each mobile phone speaker will contribute differently to the soundscape of the animation. The shape of the phones aligning creates a setting that encourages conversation.
The narration's content evolves from the adventures of a girl called “Lu”, the heroine of the story, dealing with specific challenges she is confronted with. Everytime she has to take a hard decision the users have to vote on what she should do. Her story will be told in several episodes.

Background
INSPIRATION:

website:
http://www.gURL.com/

Reduced and private style:
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_(graphic_novel)


BOOKS:

Girl Wide Web, Girls the internet and the Negotiation of Identity, Sharon R. Mazzarella, 2005
Bitchfest, by Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler, 2006
The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, 2000
Sugar and Spice, sexuality and adolescent girls, by Sue Lees, 1993
The Psychology of Sexual Victimization, Michelle Antoinette Paludi, 1999
Backlash, Susan Faludi, 1991
Grassroots, A Field Guide for Feminist Activism, Jennifer Baumgartner and Amy Richards, 2005


HELP

for Tech stuff:
Mobile Media Class (Shawn van Every)
Lower East Side Girls Club (internship, user testing)


TOOLS:

Flash Lite, Php, MySQL, Final Cut Pro, Toon Boom,
Mobile Phones, Animation Software,





Audience
Teenage girls

User Scenario
You download a little application on your phone. If you open it, your phone searches for your friend's phones around you via bluetooth.The video start synchronized. After watching a clip you can vote on which path of the narration you would decide for.
After watching a few animations you start talking about what you saw.

Implementation
The interaction is coordinated by a Flash Lite application. Users download the application on their phones and navigate to the videos through a actionscript generated graphical user interface. It takes care of the bluetooth communication among the user's phones. Animations are streamed, to avoid costs to the user. Each clip is linked to the clips of option in order to provide the users with the part they chose to see next.
The animations themselves are partly hand-drawn and then scanned, partly generated with a wacom on the computer. The pieces are exported in different formats, depending on the users phone. While watching the clip the pieces have to get reassembled by holding the phone screens together in a certain order explained at the beginning of the clip. Each phone adds different sound patterns to the animation.
The overall experience I want to achieve technically, is that the result is more then the sum of its parts.