Vine Changed My Life

Not really, but it has made the last few months more fun.

I wanted to make movies. Documentaries. Smart, funny, true stories, told on film. I studied journalism at a school with film and video programs, and by sophomore year I wanted to be the next Ross McElwee.

Then I started making movies.

They were awful. My projects were too long, too shaky, too scattered, too selfish, and too boring. And while the rise of digital video (this was around 2005) made filmmaking equipment much more compact, I still had gear to drag around. On good days it was simply a camera in a heavy case and a tripod and microphone. On bad days I had to check out a full lighting kit from the school media center and wrangle my classmates into the requisite crew. The process and the product were not enjoyable.

By contrast, everything I needed for print, web, and radio journalism fit easily into a bag. I didn’t need a car to get to stories. I could interview people in public spaces without attracting passersby. I never had to look out for videobombers.

When I left school I still had a love for filmmaking. I got a Flip Camera and imagined all the great short-subject documentaries I could make with a Flip and my copy of Final Cut. I shot hours of footage. I bought a new external hard drive to hold the data. I never edited a frame.

When an iOS update brought video to the iPhone’s camera app, I shrugged. I briefly considered using my iPhone to make the kind of home movies I remember my parents shooting when we got our first family camcorder. But I couldn’t remember watching any of those tapes after we shot them. Instead, I focused my energy on Hipstamatic and Instagram. I figured anything worth sharing was best represented with a photo, even if I drowned it in filters.

Then I watched a friend use Vine. My concept of video in the mobile age changed instantly. My head hurt with the desire to have been born just a few years later, which is a pretty rotten thing to feel if you’re under 30.

Maybe I’m overstating my excitement. But I was filled with so many ideas for things to document on Vine that I felt the guilt of oversharing before I could download the app.

Vine videos are everything my college videos weren’t: short, easy, ephemeral. They can be forgotten and disposed of without guilt. The six-second time limit eliminates the most-common amateur filmmaker mistake, that of the too-long finished product.

I use Vine the way I use Instagram. I document what I’m doing or seeing (usually this means silliness around the office or happenings in my neighborhood). Some occasions call for photos, others for video. It’s two languages. (I haven’t spent much time with the new bilingual Instagram yet, but I worry about cacophony.)

I’m not praising Vine as a replacement for filmmaking. There are jobs that film does and Vine can’t do them. Vine’s jobs are mostly social. Vine gives a sense of a moment and transmits that sense to the world. But the process of posting to Vine is similar to the process of making a video. Users contemplate edits. They think of how shots go together and how to capture a specific feeling, moment or story in six seconds. These are thoughts the student filmmaker version of me considered in the storyboarding phase and in the editing room. Vine compresses this process. It lifts a mental burden the same way the smartphone lifts a physical one. With an iPhone, you don’t need a crew to shoot a nice-looking video. With Vine, the process of of deciding how to make that video turns into a few snap decisions made with the eyes and the thumb. It doesn’t replace documentary films, but it allows more things to be documented than ever before.

The Vinemaker’s commitment is small, and the perceived payoff of seeing a user like a video is significant in comparison. The alternatives to Vine are to shoot and edit a video or to share raw video, the former too meticiulous and time-consuming, the latter too boring. Vine has people speaking the language of video. And there’s a desire to speak it well. At an outdoor event a few weeks ago a man asked if he could take a quick shot of a frozen banana I was eating for a Vine he was working on. He was documenting this event, scouring the area for shots. (I documented his documentation.)

There’s no undo on Vine and no way to remove shots. This linear approach to filmmaking has long been obsolete, but in this context I find myself taking more care to line up shots. I’m making each shot shorter out of fear of running out of time. (There’s one little thing I’ve now fallen in love with on Vine. It’s the tiny bit of adjustment that shows up in shots when the autofocus turns on during filming. The screen shakes a little as the focus shifts. It’s not necessarily a desirable effect — and I’ve abandoned certain shoots because of it — but it’s inherent in Vine. To keep with the whole language metaphor, you could call this an accent.)

And if it goes wrong, so what? If that stranger’s frozen banana shot had been overexposed or poorly framed, he’d have been stuck with it. Maybe he’d give up his Vine. At the most he’d lose a few minutes of planning and shooting. Maybe he’d post it anyway. If people didn’t like it, so what? They would scroll down to the next Vine and he’d move on to shooting something else. He wouldn’t have to reassemble a crew or draft a new storyboard.

Having Vine on my homescreen leaves me ready to document the small, video-worthy moments in my life. I’m looking at the world and thinking of shots and cuts. I’ve rediscovered how fun it is to think this way. Now I’d like to make something larger than a Vine. I’ve found a camera that can shoot stills and quality video. I’m planning to re-install Final Cut. I’ll take on a larger risk and hope for a larger payoff. I think it’ll be fun. But if it doesn’t happen, if it all falls apart and my new endeavors fail and weeks of work end up being for naught. I’ll always be ready to spend six seconds falling back in love.