Arts & Life

Vine is social filmmaking for the smartphone era

The Internet changes at such an alarming rate that it’s often hard to keep up. Social networking apps are the latest big thing, selling for huge amounts of money often before anybody knows how they’re going to be used yet. Nobody could have predicted that Instagram would be purchased for a billion dollars last year or that Pinterest would turn its “virtual bulletin board” premise into a multi-billion dollar company in just a few months.

As far as apps are concerned, it’s still the Wild West. People throw out ideas to the universe, and the users decide if it’s worth anything. This is the case with Vine, the new app by Twitter, which has taken the photo-sharing and simplicity of Instagram and applied it to videos.

Vine is an app that allows you to share short videos with friends. This doesn’t sound all that original; in fact, there are hundreds of apps that do just that, but the genius of Vine is in the design.

With one tap of the screen, Vine’s video capturing tool opens, a perfectly square viewfinder much like Instagram, which captures video only when the user touches anywhere in the square itself. Lift your finger, and the recording stops until you touch it again. This gives the user the ability to edit as they go, add different shots and even create stop-motion animations by tapping the screen ever so slightly.

These videos are restricted to six seconds but can be as short as three seconds, and they loop continuously as long as the user is looking at them. This is similar to an animated GIF, but the addition of sound makes them all the more mesmerizing. This looping feature encourages users to make videos that aren’t just fun to watch the first time but are also worth watching over and over again.

It’s been a little over a month since its inception at the end of January, and despite some early hiccups involving pornographic clips being uploaded to the system, people are starting to define how it can be used. The app turns every iPhone user into an amateur filmmaker and forces them to edit down their lofty ideas into a six-second format.

Scrolling through your Vine feed is simple and easy. Each video plays as soon as it’s onscreen. There are no play and pause buttons and no load times. The simplicity of observing and creating Vines is what’s going to make this app stand out above other video options.

People have ideas for funny or creative videos every day, and they either don’t think they have the time to make them, or they don’t think they’re Youtube-worthy. Vine makes it so easy, it’s almost inexcusable to not pull your phone out and start making videos. Sometimes the smallest, silliest and most spur-of-the-moment ideas turn out to be the best.

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