Online-video editingannouncesitself the seams are the whole point.
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Lights on, no ones home, says Hass.
I had a 20-minute reel of her just staring at the camera.
Then he added a little flavor: Cell phone rings, burps, farts.
He pooped out the first video with no intention of its going anywhere besides the sewer systems of Reddit.
Instead, a Vine celebrity shared it on his Twitter account, and it went viral.
The editing in the videos pioneered on platforms like YouTube, Vine, and TikTokannouncesitself.
The seams are the whole point, making you aware of the creator behind the phone camera.
These videos draw drama and comedy from the distortions, filters, and overlaid text loudly disrupting a clip.
Its the shaky-cam close-up that punctuates a moment of stupidity.
Its the in-camera pans or cutaways or sudden focus on something goofy at just the right moment.
ItsNicki Minajs Roman Holiday at 5x speed.
You think,How the hell did they do that?
A growing body of tropes is now built into the ways many amateurs edit their home footage.
They have all of the internet to stitch together, the messier and more iterative the better.
Then, in 2007, came an innovation known as the lip dub.
Soon, other companies, youth groups, student councils, and groups of friends started making them too.
Lip dubs were complex Rube Goldberg machines, with humans as their gizmos, satisfyingly clicking into place.
They became so ubiquitous as a cultural phenomenon theydid one onThe Office.
And they coincided with another landmark 2007 event: the release of the iPhone.
Previously bedroom-bound YouTubers could suddenly explore more ambitious filming styles with nimble cinematography and cuts between locations.
He was struck by the idea of combining selfies, social media, and music sharing.
Musical.ly grew popular primarily due to how easily it facilitated lip-syncing.
Only now, using a phones front-facing camera, it no longer took elaborate coordination among multiple people.
And its in-app editing tools made it easy, even expected, to apply flourishes in postproduction.
The speed manipulation gave peoples movements an uncanny, hyperreal effect.
The jarring edit is out-jarred by the subject matter.)
The peak of Vines popularity came in 2014.
Once its stars found opportunities beyond Vine, though, they stopped using it.
In some ways, TikTok was similar to the apps that came before it.
But it took things a step further.
Green-screen-based video trends, for example, had been popular on YouTubefor years.
The shape of new artforms has always been dictated by the confines of technology.
Early photography could only capture subjects that stood perfectly still.
Silent movies favored a physical, expressive acting and tightly choreographed set pieces.
Wei singles out TikToks Duets feature as one of the apps greatest value propositions.
It allows creators to build on another creators video by editing alongside it.
Innovation is possible within any of the tools TikTok offers.
So much of online videos editing-as-humor sensibility would have never existed without the work of individual creators.
But more than any one influence, online video is a communal art form.
Works exist in direct conversation with each other.
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