Today’s class and readings focused on cinematic editing and the directorial voice. I thought this tied into some up-and-coming social media tools.
Vine is an app that allows users to create 6 second videos. The launch post from the company introduces their product as:
Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They’re quirky, and we think that’s part of what makes them so special.
We’re also happy to share the news that Vine has been acquired by Twitter. Our companies share similar values and goals; like Twitter, we want to make it easier for people to come together to share and discover what’s happening in the world. We also believe constraint inspires creativity, whether it’s through a 140-character Tweet or a six-second video.
Other sites such as VinePeek (site disclaimer: This stream is coming straight from Vine and is unmoderated. You have been warned”. I have only seen one inappropriate video pop up). Create a stream of these 6-second videos.
With the constraint of only 6 seconds, how do themes and concepts for this weeks reading map to this app and the videos produced? Does the fact that it’s perpetuated by social media change any of that? Have you used this before? How and why did you edit videos the ways you did? I want to hear all about your thoughts on vine!
Seriously, I wasted way too much time on VinePeek the other day. It’s pretty cool.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 5, 2013 at 9:21 pm
schaplin22
Katie! I actually downloaded the app a couple of weeks ago. The reason that I did was because I saw it on some website that I was looking at that said it was the next big thing like “Twitter”. Being able to post a video that is short kind of like the limit that you have to say something on Twitter. I have not even opened the app yet but because you said something I actually might check it out now!
Have you heard of “EyeEm”? It is kind of like Instagram the filters are able to be changed by swiping left and right and you can change the frame of the picture by swiping up and down. There is also a special way to tag your photos. I haven’t really touched the app too much but it seems pretty cool, maybe check it out for yourself and let me know how you like it!
February 5, 2013 at 10:15 pm
Rayne Zhou
The advantage for this short video is that people need to carefully convey what they try to say because they only have 6 seconds, so this will potentially lead to some really condensed good videos. However, on the other side, since it only needs 6 seconds, it is really convenient and fast for people to create one video. This means that some videos may just be meaningless and even annoyed. Anyway, it depends on how people use it.
February 5, 2013 at 11:10 pm
jordanbeck
I just spent five minutes on VinePeek (I waffled on whether to say spent versus wasted and decided spent was more appropriate since I did think about Murch while I was watching all those crappy crappy videos). Anyway, here’s my insight: If blinking is one aspect of sense-making then these videos take blinking to its extreme and situate themselves much closer to nonsense. By and large, they’ve “render[ed] visual reality [too] discontinuous” with hyper-punctuation.
February 6, 2013 at 8:16 pm
tsaiyiwu
Hi Katie,
Thank you very much for introducing us the quirking thing of Vine. I am much interested in the recent social phenomena of these fragmented expressions. For me, it links to all the more serious issue of “the death of the author” and the transformation of our subjectivity. As Lamarque notes, the notion of authorship originate from the Romantic age, when people believed individual to be a psychological entity of rich and complex feelings and thoughts, and we perhaps need a whole lengthy book, such as Rousseau’s Confessions, to explore these feelings. The postmodern age is however, considered as an age of the author’s demise, when Foucault and other thinkers no more believe in the notion of “individual,” along with its complicated psychological structure. If what Foucault thinks is true, this new cultural ethos certainly should affect the form of our expressions now, as most of them are short, mundane, meaningless, reflexive. An author of a complex psychological structure does not seem to underlie these expressions on Twitter or Vine. People re-tweet and repeat what other people say.
More to my interest, is the visibility and connectivity of “the everyday” on Twitter and Vine, a topic that I have been studying for a whole. The clip “Twitter in Plain English” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o
articulates well the rationale of twitter. The expressions now are less about the expression of the self, but more about a way of connection to each other in our daily life. They can and should be short, to satisfied people’s need of constant connections and reflexive expressions. They should be perfectly mundane, as people now perhaps no more deem themselves as a complex psychological entity and their being are more be strongly felt in the everyday. —I make this of my fanciful argument from a group of postmodern/poststructuralist philosophies that I have read, some of them are well summarized in Lamarque.
An aside note: here is a website that introduce well the rationale of social media, from which I benefit much. http://mashable.com/social-media/