Looking to broaden the horizons of mobisode-makers, online distributor iThentic has commissioned six Canadian filmmakers — including Hubert Davis, Renuka Jeyapalan and a pseudonym’ed fellow known only as Apeman888 — to each give their take on the theme of obsession in a three-minute short.

‘The genesis of this project came from our experience at iThentic,’ says CEO Catherine Tait. ‘The majority of mobile videos received are factual or reality-based. Our interest was to engage filmmakers, both experienced and amateur, in more complex storytelling required in narrative filmmaking in under three minutes.’

The shorts, copro’ed with the National Film Board, are produced by iThentic’s Kevin O’Keefe and the NFB’s Lea Marin, with Tait and Silva Basmajian as exec producers. The other filmmakers involved are Shui-bo Wang, Malcolm Clarke and Bruce McCall.

‘Turnaround on these films was quick. It ranged between six to 14 weeks, depending on when the filmmaker was contracted,’ says Marin. ‘Filming commenced in mid-September and the wrap on the final project was the end of November.’

The obsessions in question range from hair loss in Apeman888’s Superbald, to fantasizing about a stranger in Jeyapalan’s Baggage, and extreme customer care in Clarke’s Dirty Trick.

The Mobile Stories project also set out to create a filmmaker’s toolkit — a tutorial with key elements of storytelling — and is putting on a contest for user-generated content, offering a $1,000 prize to amateur or student filmmakers.

IFC Canada will air the six commissioned shorts and the contest winner in late 2008. The winning short will also be showcased at the CFC’s Worldwide Short Film Festival in June. The deadline for submissions is April 5.