When Motorola handed filmmaker Pat Mills a camera phone and told him to make a movie, little did he know that the resulting film, Pat’s First Kiss, would do the festival circuit, including a stop at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

It all started last year when Mills participated in Talent Lab, an artistic-development program for emerging filmmakers at TIFF. Since 2004, Motorola has been a key sponsor of Talent Lab, providing each participant with a camera-enabled phone to make a self-portrait short film, with the intention of allowing participants to challenge themselves and to get to know each other better.

This is not to say that Talent Lab graduates are not expected to be prolific and successful. According to Karen Black, TIFF’s acting director of Canadian initiatives, this year’s festival features seven more films by past Talent Lab participants as part of the Short Cuts Canada program. This year’s TIFF will also feature a Motorola trailer entitled A Short History of Mobile Filmmaking – a humorous look at the evolution of portable home cameras, made by 2007 Talent Lab participants Adam Brodie and Dave Derewlany.

‘We are very proud of what we’re doing with Talent Lab,’ says Black, ‘and are excited to see the program this year attract international attention.’

Carly Biggart, director of marketing for Motorola Canada, adds that her company has ‘seen interest in the Motofilm program from other festivals, including the Paris Pockets Film Festival, SXSW, and even Cannes is interested in the blueprint of what we’ve been doing. It’s great for the filmmaking and the handset industries. It’s a great proof-point for the capability of our phones.’

Biggart points to new-generation handsets that feature video capture and playback at broadcast-quality 30 frames per second and removable storage offering up to four gigabytes of memory space.

‘When you see the evolution of what’s being done on the handsets, you’ll see a lot more stuff that people will be willing to pay for, watch, and share with their friends,’ she says.

These are recent innovations in the medium, however. Even as little as a year ago, poor mobile picture quality was still a factor to be considered.

‘I noticed that films made on cell phones have that muddy, pixelated look to them,’ Mills says. ‘To make a video with a mobile phone, I decided it works best to work within the restraints of the medium. It was an amazing storytelling challenge.

‘I’m not an experimental filmmaker,’ he adds, ‘but the style of film I came up with was really the result of a series of failed experiments with a new medium.’

Pat’s First Kiss features a form of animation in which drawings are moved around the frame with a string.

‘I liked that it was a way to make a film using nobody but myself,’ Mills explains. ‘I moved the images with my right hand and held the phone with my left. It was exciting to realize that anyone could make a movie like this – with no cast, no crew, and no money.

‘I never intended for Pat’s First Kiss to have a bigger audience than the Talent Lab,’ says Mills, ‘but everyone seemed to like it, so I said ‘screw it’ and sent [it] to festivals.’

Now the four-minute movie, which tells the sad-but-true story of the filmmaker’s first kiss with an undesirable stranger he met overseas, will be seen by audiences at TIFF as well as at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, among others.

‘I’ve had an odd amount of success with a film that didn’t cost me any money,’ says Mills.