Have you read about (or experienced) the success of Vine?
It’s a free iPhone/ iTouch/ iPad app
that’s like Twitter for video. You have only six seconds of screen time to tell
a story and there’s no going back to edit.
The trick for many of the Vines on the site is not to record six seconds consecutively but take, for instance, six shots lasting one second each (or even less time each, for stop-motion animation).
Your video goes onto the Vines site immediately and you can share it via Twitter or Facebook, or embed it on the web. The six-second clips loop (repeat). You can follow people to see their Vines, and people can follow you.
So, what do people do with their six seconds? Here are a few examples:
A man looks uncomfortable, starts to choke and then ejects an entire orange from his mouth… (119,214 “likes”)
A dog dressed up in a robe and with (apparently) human hands feeds itself little treats…(113,110)
A hand draws an egg that then careens around the page and then turns into a real egg. (11,363)
One of the few that has a story as such shows a baby playing around with a mobile phone. It presses one of the buttons and we cut to a car blowing up (shot of a TV screen playing a scene from The Godfather, I think).
Is Vine another demonstration of our shortening attention span? (You’re still reading this, aren’t you?...Hello?) Or just a bit of fun? Or both? I don’t know, but if you want to challenge yourself to tell a story in six seconds, check it out. It's harder than it looks.
(If you need some guidance for telling a story longer then six seconds--perhaps in a book--get a copy of my book, Your Writing Coach. It's published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)
