Making Films and TV for Small Screens

A New Era of Entertainment: Making TV & Film for the Small Screen

December 11, 2024Phones Article

For a long time, the only way of telling a narrative via the medium of art was in the theatre. Then, the development of film in the middle to late part of the 1890s allowed thing to progress to the cinema screen, with cinema developing from that moment on.

The Silent Era of film moved into the sound era in 1927, with the Golden Age of Hollywood not far behind. Cinema became an art form, with some of the finest pictures ever made occurring between 1927 and 1960. Cinema kept developing, with the likes of IMAX being created to make films as big as possible.

Now, though, people watch film and TV on their phones. What has it done to the production process?

Why We’ve Moved to the Small Screen

Make no mistake, there are still plenty of people who are happy to head to the cinema on a regular basis. According to Box Office Mojo, Inside Out 2 made more than $1.6 billion worldwide in 2024, with Deadpool & Wolverine not too far behind with $1.3 billion made around the world. Despicable Me 4 failed to break the billion dollar mark, but still took over $900 million.

Films, therefore, can make huge sums of money thanks to the number of people who are willing to go and watch them in a cinema alongside a wealth of other people. It is perhaps not all that surprising that two of the highest grossing films were animation.

For the first time in box office history, every single one of 2024’s top 10 (more like 12) highest-grossing films is a sequel.

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— Tom Schrack (@tschrack.bsky.social) 25 November 2024 at 13:52

That is because people often look for things to do with their kids, with a trip to the cinema being ideal. The problem is that other people exist. People talk. People eat popcorn. People get their mobile phones out and send messages or answer calls. In other words, people are extraordinarily annoying to such an extent that a lot of people choose not to go to the cinema for fear of having their experience seeing a film ruined for them.

As a result, a lot of people will choose to watch things on their TV at home or on their computer screen. It is also not out of the realms of the possible that someone might watch something on their phone.

We Like to Multitask

It has become more and more popular for people to multitask when it comes to watching TV programmes and films. That is to say, you might have a TV show on your phone as you do the hoovering, or watch a film on your big TV whilst you keep an eye on the football on your phone screen.

Whatever it is that you like to do with your time, more and more people are looking to do more than one thing at the same time, resulting in the need to view things on a smaller screen. From the moment that Netflix changed its business model away from sending DVDs to people in the post and moved to streaming, the rules changed almost overnight.

Prior to that, directors, actors and everyone associated with film and TV would only really think about what it would look like on the silver screen. Sure, everyone was aware that it would move to televisions eventually, but there was little thought put in to how it would look when it did so.

That was a problem for further down the line. Nowadays, however, everyone has to think of those multitaskers out there who want to be able to have a film or TV programme playing on their phone whilst they do something else. All departments have to be concerned with how things will look when they are shrunken down from the cinema screen.

Smaller Screens Change the Viewing Experience

In the December of 2016, the critic Anne Billson said, “People who watch movies on phones, especially if they think they can leave valid critical comments on IMDB, should be shot”. Whilst that was a slight exaggeration of the truth, it is certainly the case that many people despise the use of small screens to watch things like television shows or films.

Yet for others, the desire to do exactly that is inescapable. Even Martin Scorsese seemed to predict what would happen, saying in 1989, “Having instant access to movies, being able to pick something up and show it at the drop of a hat, is great”. It was as though he knew streaming would be a thing.

Scorsese has made many films in the streaming era, with Killers of the Flower Moon being made specifically for Apple TV. Quite whether he will have wanted that to be watched on a screen as small as a mobile phone isn’t clear, but there is no question that he will have known it would have been a possibility for some.

There is an irony to that, considering the fact that he begged people not to watch The Irishman on their phones, in spite of the fact that it was financed by Netflix. It is likely that he will have changed his tune four years later, given the fact that screens you can watch things on seem to be getting smaller and smaller with every passing minute.

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In the November of 2024, for example, a company named Tiny Circuits released a retro-style television set that had functional knobs and even a remote control, yet the screen was just 1.14-inches and boasted a resolution of 216 x 135 pixels. Although it could display 65,000 colours and had a front-facing speaker, there is little doubt that few people would be turning to the device to watch Gladiator 2 on it after its release or loading up Braveheart for their home consumption.

Yes, even the most old-school of directors is likely to have accepted that we’ve all moved on from only watching things on a cinema screen, even this might be a step too far.

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