It’s been a long day at work.
To wind down, you cook up some popcorn and curl up in the lazy chair. You then watch a movie -– on your cell phone.
Actually, Dack Ragus doesn’t expect people to do that with his work, but he is among the first designers of mobile-phone movies.
And the Minneapolis Web designer has settled on a distinct genre: He draws stick figures to play the lead role in famous movies, and he always decapitates them.
“What better character is there for head removal than a stickman, whether it be by explosion, whip, karate kick or shark attack?” Ragus said. “After they first appeared on the mobile version of my site, I got a couple of calls from startup wireless content providers, wanting to buy the series. But nothing ever came of it.”
Ragus has decided to bring back his mobile film, “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” named after the movie starring Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant. But this time, the movie, part of what he calls his “Cell Phone Theater,” is on his personal website.
While the film is on the violent side -– it ends with the beheading of the lead stick man –- viewers admit it’s a stitch.
“It is funny,” said Alexa Graf, a spokeswoman for AT&T Wireless. “It’s like a joke e-mail.”
Neerav Berry, co-founder of Cellmania.com, said: “There’s a demand for interesting wireless, optimized applications and games. This definitely falls into that area.”
While Ragus has no immediate plans to make money off his mobile movies, he would consider selling them and even creating others like it.
“I’ve been working on an interactive head-removal movie for a while, but just haven’t been motivated to finish it,” he said. “The response I’ve gotten from ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ may get me to finally complete the project.”
“Four Weddings and a Funeral” is broken into five vignettes: Stick man getting his head chopped off while checking the mail. Stick man losing his head in a duel with an Indiana Jones wannabe. Stick man’s head falling off when he looks out the window. Stick man getting eaten by a shark.
For the grand finale, stick man loses his head in a karate match.
Each segment is set up by a paragraph explaining stick man’s actions without revealing the ending. But here is a hint: Viewers with poor eyesight probably shouldn’t watch the movie. The film clips are just one-half inch by one inch in size, to fit the screen of a mobile phone.
While stick man can’t be downloaded onto mobile phones as he appears on the website, Ragus did write the clips in wireless markup language (WML), the meta-data language of most Web-enabled cell phones.
“When they first appeared on the phone version of dack.com, I got a lot of feedback from fellow wireless developers saying, ‘Wow, that’s cool,’ or ‘How did you do that?'” Ragus said. “When they were republished on the normal website there wasn’t that much interest, probably because there are dozens of other stick-figure death movies out there, most much more advanced and gory than Cell Phone Theater.”
Michael Brody, a child psychiatrist from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), said watching cartoons in which characters are decapitated has historically been a form of entertainment. But he wouldn’t recommend Cell Phone Theater or others like it to sensitive viewers.
“I think the fascination with this has to do with the unfortunate frustration and anger in our culture,” Brody said.
