This is why I love Vine

Follow me on Vine @RaymondRoman or Subscribe to me on YouTube at @RayRomanVineVideos where I’ve decided to upload them for those without the app yet can see.  Hopefully after this post you’ll sign up and join the fun!

I signed up for Vine a little over a month ago and love it for so many reasons.  If you don’t already  know what Vine is, it’s basically Instagram for videos.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. -Orson Welles

The maximum length for each video is 6 seconds.  My initial thought was ‘why not 10 seconds?’, but 6 seconds is just perfect.

By the looks of this graph (via Reelseo.com) most people lose their attention span after the first 10 seconds.  6 seconds is perfect for Vine videos because it’s in the range of nearly 100% of the audiences attention span.  What I like about only having 6 seconds is that it forces the user to use the time wisely for their video.  Some people will use the 6 seconds creatively to tell a short story, while others might use it to post a clip of what they’re viewing at a concert.  There really are no limitations besides the time you’re given and the way you piece together your video with in-camera editing.

In-camera editing is the technique of shooting your video in the order it will be viewed in.  Filmmakers might do this to save them time in post production so the editing is easy to clean up.  I’ve done this before with 8mm film as a student project because we had no way of editing our short.

The way in-camera editing is done in Vine is when you press down on the screen the app begins recording, once you let go it stops.  You can repeat this process as many times as you like within the 6 seconds.  This is where your creativity comes into play.  What kind of short idea can you tell with the time limitations your given?  If there’s one thing I dislike about the Vine app is that there are no “takes”.  What I mean is.. if your a perfectionist like me, your in-camera editing must be on point or else you will have to settle for minor flaws or redo your video over again.

For example, in this video above I had to redo the entire thing about 4-5 times just to get the last scene right.  In this video I grab a soda, chug it, throw it to the ground and it explodes [well.. that’s what I was going for].  Unfortunately, the last scene was hard to get the timing right and because of this I had to start all over.  I wish Vine would create “takes”, so say for instance I don’t like how my last shot came out — I could have the option to redo my last shot.  You would only be allowed to redo the current take you’re on.  This would especially be helpful in situations where you capture something live.  Say I’m at a concert and I capture the lead singer stage diving, and on my next take I respond to his actions in my Vine video and say “that was awesome!”.  Well what if ‘awesome’ got cut off due to my time limitations?  This is where takes would come in handy so you can simply redo that last part because most likely there’s no way you’re going to catch the singer doing another stage dive.  Am I making sense?  Of course having no takes forces you to perfect your Vine videos but creatively I think they would be good for the final outcome of videos.  What do you think?