Infinity in your palm

As more people (sometimes grudgingly) shift to watching content from small screens to even smaller ones — video producers and device manufacturers are pushing to create a more immersive on-the-go experience

Watching a fellow commuter watch World War Z on his phone, (sounds like Joseph Heller looking at Rembrandt’s painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer) I thought I would never ever watch content on my phone. What is the fun of watching zombies bring a chopper down on a tiny little screen?

When film editor Arindam Ghatak (Rocket Singh, Go Goa Gone) posted on Facebook that his mother was on a movie-watching spree as she recovered from a cerebral stroke, I was intrigued. “Now she spends most of her waking hours pouring over her phone watching classics on YouTube,” Arindam wrote. “Ray would have been horrified. So would a lot of us, at the very thought of watching entire films on a little smartphone. But she is so full of joy when she sits to watch her films, it fills me with joy and I stop caring about the perfect, pure way to watch a film.”

A series of events conspired to convert me. I spend upwards of two hours on my commute and use it to catch up on my reading. When I borrowed a particularly hefty tome from the library (Ian Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close) I was not keen on lugging it around. Serendipitously, I needed to watch the cocaine-drenched series Narcos. And so I started watching content on my commute keeping Rebus’ shenanigans for my bedside table.

A different dimension

It was a whole new world. One episode on the way to work and one episode on my return. Now it didn’t matter if traffic was backed up from here to eternity because I was lost in the bylanes of Medellin where sicarios, the DEA and the Colombian police fought a deadly war.

As the screens get bigger (3D, IMAX) and smaller (the phones we use), crews also approach content differently. Talking on the sets of the third season of Netflix show Narcosin Bogota, production designer Salvador Parra spoke of highlighting textures and details on the sets, as “The cameras now are so powerful, it makes sense to keep it layered for depth.”

This convenience factor has boosted the popularity of streaming services manyfold, causing the ripple effect of having better content being greenlit for them, and more actors wanting to work in the medium. Diego Klattenhoff, who plays Agent Donald Ressler in the series The Blacklist said there are more opportunities to be had now. In an interview promoting the show, the actor said over the phone, “You see it in the talent that is being attracted to the medium. Twenty-five years ago, you would have certain actors that would not even touch television. Now that there are so many great stories being told, so many great writers in the business, that as an actor there are so many choices.”

Once the floodgates of mobile viewing were opened, there seemed no end to content I could and did watch on my phone — from Kevin Spacey’s incredible impressions to Conan and rare Bob Dylan performances.

How good is it?

The litmus test, I thought, would be to watch a film on my phone and chose Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. To all who scream philistine, sacrilege and blasphemy, my defence is the film scared the bejesus out of me. I thought the phone will bring down the disquiet to manageable levels — one can always look at the gridlock at Mekhri Circle (Bengaluru) just as Jack Torrance crashes through the door with his favourite axe.
The Shining proved underwhelming — the real horror was how dated it looked. While the beauty of the never-ending tracking shots provided for an immersive experience, the disquieting difference in the sound of Danny’s tricycle on the wooden floor and carpet was lost thanks to the ambient sounds.
I thought I should give the phone one more chance (yes, as you can see there is all the passion of a new convert). I chose another Nicholson starrer, A Few Good Men, and found his ‘You want the truth’ tirade as effective on the phone as it was on telly and the big screen.
That gloomy prince of Denmark could well have been talking of the irrelevance of screen-size when he said he could be bound in a nutshell and consider himself the king of infinite space. All you need are a good pair of headphones.
Small gets better
As more content comes to streaming services like Netflix, Hotstar and Amazon Prime, which in turn offer robust smartphone apps to help viewers watch on the go, phone manufacturers have been putting some thought into this watching experience. Screens, which had begun to plateau in terms of size and resolution, have become the focal point of innovation again. Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, Essential and now even Apple have mastered the art of stretching larger displays to fit into comfortably small form factors. Most manufacturers now use OLED screens backed up with High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology on their premium phones; tech which only debuted on TVs recently. Devices with super-high resolution like new Samsung and Sony flagships, which usually run at less than full potential for daily tasks to preserve battery, intelligently unlock their full resolution when video apps are used. All this ensures that the little details production designers like Parra include in the physical world of the set are represented on the smallest screen as well as on that massive home theatre.
Even the sound factor has not been ignored. LG has been including Quad Digital to Analog Converters (DACs) on its flagship phones for a while, ensuring that your high end headphones can be used to their maximum potential even by a tiny phone. On the flip side, as more manufacturers drop the headphone jack altogether and Bluetooth headphones get better, they replace it by including support for the newest Bluetooth 5.0 standard and aptX lossless audio codecs (which is set to be supported natively by Android in the upcoming 8.0 Oreo version).