As the smartphone became more and more popular and people expected their phones to do more than just call someone, the camera phone came to the scene. Soon video cameras were added to mobile devices and there was no looking back.
Being able to carry a small and convenient recording device with you wherever you went, changed the amount of video content we saw on the internet. Online platforms like YouTube and Vimeo took off, social media allowed for video posts, and mobile video-only platforms took internet traffic by storm.
Vine was a story of ultimate highs and ultimate lows, a true internet fame starlet. Vine was acquired in 2012 by Twitter and launched in 2013. Within two short years the short-form video hosting service, on which users shared six-second-long video clips, became so popular it had 200 million active users. But only about a year later Twitter was announcing the beginning of the end. “Dear Vine Community — thank you for all the inspiration, laughs, and loops. We have now placed Vine in an archived state.” the website reads in a banner at the top still today.
The story of Vine is a common story of passing fads and trending internet memes but ultimately made way for what Instagram and other rival companies have become. The interest and enjoyment that people get out of short-form video storytelling wasn’t something people could have really predicted and here we are with Instagram Stories, IGTV, TikTok and more today.
Instagram Stories has blown up the market for short-form video and social media content. While Stories aren’t being listed in top-ten videos on YouTube (yet), reports state that as of January 2019 Instagram Stories was up to 500 million daily active users. Instagram Stories actually launched the same year that Vine became defunct. Stories has gone on to offer users so much more than Vine did, however, with filters, stickers, handsfree recording, and the covetable swipe up feature among others. Honorable mention here goes to Snapchat, as Instagram and Snapchat were neck-and-neck at one point. In fact, many criticized Instagram for allegedly copying Snapchat features. In a Recode interview with CEO of Instagram Stories, Kevin Systrom, the publication wrote that “he likened the two social apps’ common features to the auto industry: Multiple car companies can coexist, with enough differences among them that they serve different consumer audiences”
The Note Card Story or Confession format was given a new platform with Instagram. The trending video storytelling format became popular on YouTube around 2010. These intimate videos showed young people alone in a room with a stack of note cards, with just a few words or so written on each. The person in the video would flip through the cards one-by-one without saying anything as some evocative music played in the background, the person staring straight into the camera. These messages and videos were usually very emotional, raw, and held almost a confessional or cathartic quality for the person making the video. One of the earliest reported videos of this kind was posted in 2010 and by 2013 there were around 3 million videos under the search words “note card story”, reports a 2014 article on Cogitatio Press. It’s easy to assume the personal and intimate nature of these videos were what made them so popular and who can resist a peek into a secret life? This trend shed light on the consequences of bullying and showed the fragility of adolescence. It probably had a significant impact on the new attention paid to teen mental health. Something that really feeds into the popularity of Instagram Stories as well was the voyeuristic nature. We just can’t pull away from it. Instagram has now become a powerful platform for opening up to a public audience in an intimate way.
No one really knows where the Note-Card-Story format came from but if you look back at an early Bob Dylan music video you can see some similarities. In 1965, Dylan and a filmmaker named D.A. Pennebaker had a unique idea for a video of Dylan’s song Subterranean Homesick Blues. Bob Dylan is just standing in what looks like a mostly unpopulated alleyway holding a stack of cards that say various lyrics from the song on them. He flips through them as he tries to keep up with the fast passed singing. It’s easy to see how the two might be connected.
It’s almost hard to think that there is anything new left to do or discover since technology and science have come so far. But video storytelling has an amazing way of impressing us and moving us in new ways again and again and again, whether it’s a new technique a filmmaker uses to tell a story or it’s someone being clever with a cellphone.
Mike Posner, American singer-songwriter, took the Note-Card-Story format and gave us a music video that tells a story that is so much louder than the volume level it’s played at. The music video for Move On is shot in a verticle frame like it was done on his cellphone with many close up selfie shots of himself silently going through honest and raw emotions much like what can be seen in the teens’ videos on YouTube with their note cards. Instead of note cards, the screen goes black with simple white text across it, telling us his story spliced in between footage of his concerts, his late father, his late friend Avicci, and other innocuous moments that mean more in the context of the video, the lyrics, and Posner’s message.
There is something so inexplicable about video storytelling. People are obsessed with film and the movies, it’s no wonder simple video storytelling with a cellphone camera or the cam on the computer can be just as fascinating. Video has the potential to be so powerful and profound. Maybe what draws us in is the fact that, in this day an age, screens are so often used to hide behind rather than as tools to allow us to be so very seen…..
