There are many qualities to online screen productions that are unique to the form, aspects like the community based interactivity between the content being consumed, which can come from places like YouTube livestreams to Twitch. One avenue of online screen production that I find really interesting is the unregulated length of a lot of content, both long and short. As anyone who has created any form of content would tell you, the greater the restrictions on what you are able to produce, the more creatively you have to think about what you are making, and this is definitely the case with the short lived Vine.
With the strict 6 second rule that Vine abided by forced users to think about every moment of content they were sending out into the world, not just uploading anything and everything they desire. It made non film or content creators to think deeply about editing in the same way say a short filmmaker would have to think about their film, using every moment to their advantage to convey their idea or vision.
Above is comedian Bo Burnham who garnered a lot of acclaim through his use of Vine, as his comedy style was well suited to the short, punchy format. His videos were clearly well thought out, especially in regards to the length, as one of the main tenants of comedy is to find a way to tell your joke in as small and concise a way as possible, especially within online spaces where attention is currency. I believe that this philosophy should be used for all media content on the internet, and this idea of revising and editing your work to make it as concise and effective as possible that Vine preaches, should be taken into other video content, especially with sites like YouTube, where there are no limits to the length to the content you can upload.
Take for example this video on YouTube of a man counting to 100,000, a 40 hour video he had to make into a 24 hour video because of the restraints of his video editing software. This video definitely shows the weirdness of the internet as this video has 10.9 million views, although i’m skeptical anyone has ever seen it through to the end. What I find really interesting about this video is that I believe it was made to test the seemingly unregulated length that YouTube offers, and while this is not very interesting content, it raises a question to me at least about what sort of length video are we willing to watch while still keeping our intention.
While all of these examples are internet focused, and I do believe do its nature the internet is the platform of content creation which is the hardest to steal away and maintain the consumer’s content, but this idea of concision should be addressed in more traditional platforms like film and television. One of my favourite elements of films like Dunkirk and Lady Bird are able to create such powerful and effective narratives with the time frame of 90-100 minutes, where films are quickly running away from, preferring instead to create a film upwards of 150 minutes to tell a story that really has no artistic or logistical reason for being so long, with a common critique of a lot of modern films is that they were “20 minutes too long”. Now I’m going to end here before I get critiqued for overstaying my welcome and losing your attention.
“No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” – Roger Ebert.
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