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For a few thousand dollars, including travel expenses, a pair of Italian filmmakers have created a 93-minute movie, Nuovi Comizi D'Amore (New Love Meetings), with a Nokia N90 camera-smartphone. Directors Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi assert it is the first full-length film to be shot with a mobile handset. The film is homage to a 1965 documentary Love Meetings by Pier Paolo Pasolini, which Interviewed people about their sex lives. Mencarini and Seghezzi used the N90 to find out what has changed in the intervening forty years.

The pair say the camera phone came in handy because it was light, not invasive, easy to use and - best of all - cheap. This allowed them to shoot a movie without having to follow rules of a traditional production.

"We had our idea and we started our camera-phone when we felt like it, when the situation and the characters looked interesting. Without premeditation and without the obligation of realizing a certain amount of scenes per day. And it was especially in this attempt to tell with a different approach that the camera phone was helpful," according to Mencarini and Seghezzi.

They added, "The phone was always in our pockets, easy to use and sufficiently performed not to require a troupe, a director of photography nor professional lighting. We always used the internal microphone of the camera phone, the natural light and only in very rare occasions we used a pocket flashlight made in China cost a couple of euros."

Because of these inherent limitations of the technology compared to traditional filmmaking, the new documentary mostly features close-ups of its subjects, who were interviewed about their love lives—about 1000 people over two months with around 100 making into the final product—as in Pasolini's original film.

No post-production work was performed to the image. An AP article says the film appears a little shaky on a computer and co-director Mencarini states it can be viewed on the big screen, but "it wouldn't be high-definition."

With the Nokia N90 (see our review), the directors could record about an hour of footage at a time; every two days or so they would download scenes to a computer.

Aside from lower costs and greater flexibility, the use of a smartphone helped make the whole experience more intimate, loosening people's tongues when it came to their views of love and sex, according to co-director Barbara Seghezzi.

“To use a small instrument that belongs to people's daily routine allows you to establish an intimate dialogue, instead of using a regular camera,” she said to the AP. “The interview becomes more like a chat.”

Personal video, increasingly from mobile devices, is the tool for how people record their world today; the personal or external. As Mencarini said to the AP, “With the widespread availability of cell phones equipped with cameras, anybody could do this. If you want to say something nowadays, thanks to the new media, you can.”

The N90 was the first of Nokia’s Nseries multimedia smartphone models to feature Carl Zeiss optics, now de rigeur in all new models in the series. It has a 2-megapixel camera, while newer Nseries devices, like the N93 camera phone, for instance, feature 3.2 megapixel Carl Zeiss lenses. This latest model takes video with a 3x zoom at 30 frames per second with stereo audio recording and digital stabilization.

Nokia has sold 5 million of these multimedia-centric smartphones since introducing them last year. Canalys research reports 53 million multimedia phones sold in 2005, with Nokia commanding more than 50 percent of them. Nokia expects this market will hit 100 million units in 2006 and exceed 250 million by 2008.