• by Laurie Sullivan , September 12, 2007

Apple and Sprint will have supporting roles at the Project Accessible Hollywood (PAH) digital film festival next month in Los Angeles.

Dubbed PAH-Fest Hollywood, the festival takes place Oct. 7-13 and offers amateur moviemakers, as well as those who have never picked up a cell phone camera, the chance to tell their story, digitally.

Organizers plan to set up Apple production stations at director Christopher Coppola's L.A. movie studio, Ears XXI. The workstations will have the latest iMovie 08 software, running on either iMac or G5 computers equipped with Apple products, such as Garage Band or Logic for mixing audio tracks.

It's part of the YourTech competition, where people are welcome to bring in recently shot footage or home movies not more than two minutes long, digital photos, or any kind of digital media to create either a self portrait or story about someone else in their life. "We don't want people to become intimidated with the technology, so we help them tell their story," Coppola says.

Sprint is expected to provide cellular phones with cameras for the Cellphone Art competition that allows moviemakers to use either their video enabled phones or ones from Sprint for the day. Participants will have up to five hours to create an uninterrupted one-take, one-minute movie on a topic that will be announced the day of the competition.

Others on board are Birns & Sawyer, the oldest production equipment rental house in Hollywood; Apple specialist Mac Hollywood, and several local restaurants such as Kabuki Sushi, Chan Darae Thai restaurant, Fabiolous Café, and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, according to Nicholas Paine, Ears XXI executive producer.

Since Los Angeles has many distinct neighborhoods and ethnicities, PAH-Fest aims to involve a range of cuisines to quench the thirst and appetite of festival participants and parties.

PAH-Fest also offers Circus Vision for children 12 and under, a one-day event to kick off the festival. The goal is to see the topic through the eyes of each participating child, who will have access to a cell phone to shoot and edit their piece within five hours in one day. Then there's the MobiFlicks competition that relies on 11 teams of four filmmakers that will create one six-minute movie each from start to finish within the four days, using a high-definition digital camera from Sony or others.

Chris Northrop, who's working with Coppola to market PAH-Fest, plans to engage consumers and create buzz with a few unconventional tools learned from his days at television network Nickelodeon, videocast Ask A Ninja, Fortitude Studio, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Through word of mouth and social networking sites like News Corp.'s MySpace, Northrop hopes to involve people who are not familiar with PAH-Fest or unaware they have the ability to tell a story through digital movie making with a device as accessible as a cellular phone camera from Nokia, Motorola, Palm, Samsung, and others.

During the past two years, the festival had runs in Grants, N.M.; Santa Cruz, Calif.; Livonia, Mich.; and Elko, Nev.; as well as Izola, Slovenia, and Bremen, Germany.