https://vine.co/v/e3l6Qe7nYZH
This is a Vine. A Vine is a 6.5 second looping square video hosted on the social networking service of the same name. Vine was launched in 2013 and — through various peaks and troughs — died in 2017, dissolved into the world of increasingly-longer pockets of video content: your Snapchats and Snapchat stories, your Instagram videos. At a time when our attention spans were at their shortest, Vine packed up and shipped out. The limitations of its format became too restricting in a social media world of ten second stories, caption-able text, the proliferation of images. We’ll miss it.
At its peak, Vine created and harboured ecologies/economies of creators. From its consumer base we got absurdist comedy stars the likes of Nick Colletti, Gabriel Gundacker, Josh Ovalle: all who’ve since relocated their followings to Instagram; some who’ve maintained their comedy careers long enough to be playing shows in parts of the US. Vine presented a very real opportunity for a select few people — but how did they get there? How did we get here?
When originally pitched to Twitter, Vine was all but a microblogging tool, a way for people to capture small moments from their daily life and pop them up into the network in some great archive of fleeting happenings; passing cars shot from an upstairs window, great masses of people going on with their daily routines captured in a choppy, almost stop-motion-looking frame rate. And Twitter saw value in it as, as The Verge aptly describes it, a “near-perfect video analog to its flagship app’s short-form text posts”. Short text translates into short video, right?
There are many things that make a Vine a Vine; inherent parts and processes that, while being absorbed by short-video formats that followed, were popularised and maintained by the service. For starters: Vine is first and foremost a smartphone app, build against the integral functions of a smartphone. You need a phone with a touchscreen (to initiate recording), a camera and a microphone, at its most basic. Just like Instagram, you can only upload content to the service directly from the application.
Taken out of context, a single Vine can appear like gibberish. The Vine embedded above will likely make no sense removed from important contexts that govern the service. It taps into a certain kind of niche internet humor that was central to many communities on the service — now that the Vine network has been taken offline and transformed into a grotesque, digitally-manufactured Museum of the Moving Image in its own way, that Vine has lost some of its power, subject to loop its eternal life away in an enclosed room on some wasting URL. Archive status hurts.
A Vine is a Vine because of its length and its looping functionality. When originally designing the service, Vine’s creators struggled to settle on the perfect length for their micro-stimulation: long enough to be able to actually do something, short enough that you’d would watch the entire thing. This is the most fundamental function — think of all the Facebook and Instagram videos you’ve given up on after catching a glimpse of their length, all the Snapchat stories where someone at a gig is determined to show you the entire thing. “You don’t just skip a six-second video, so you watch it. And when you like it … you appear to watch it three, four, five, six times in a row”, attests the president of a Vine-using marketing company Armstrong, Pierre Laromiguiere.
The key to Vine was its length, and the constraints this length then posed. In cinema, you’ve got ~2 hour and a thousand hours of footage that can be cut in an infinite number of ways. In Vine, you don’t have such luxury. In the world of emerging online screen media projects — from web series to interactive documentaries — making use of, and interrogating, the intrinsic elements of these things is, well … the aim of the studio. It’s a way of making for the new, in response to the new. It’s all very exciting!
For this project we decided to look at the ‘unregulated length’ of these mediums, which, in the case of Vine, we’ve flipped to ‘regulated length’. How does Vine work as this video analog to Twitter’s short-form text posts? How has Twitter’s decision to up the character count from 140 to 280 affected this? We’re living in a post-Vine world, folks. 6.5 seconds is no longer the norm.