I want to leave a little bit of a brainstorm before we head into the weekend, because it’s something that has crossed my mind a number of times over the years. Obviously, TikTok has become an insurmountable app when it comes to how the world is connecting digitally. I won’t refer to any of the dancing, but moreso the creation of very short “movies”. This has been a thought of mine for years, because Vine was the previous iteration of the digestible motion-picture format, where creative minds had virtually seconds to come up with an engaging beginning, middle, and end to their tales, whether they were well timed jokes or relatable moods. Sure, these video-making tools have many other purposes, but the reinterpretation of a visual story (or punchline) is what I’m fixated on.

To me, it’s a sign that cinema is forever changing. In an age where we can digitally stream almost anything we wish to see, there is an urgency to tend to the low attention spans we have generated. This is where quick videos come in, particularly because they scratch that itch one might have for witnessing an actual narrative, even if it’s thirty seconds long. That viral video of “Jessica” singing “Low” by Ronnie Miller is a well crafted joke where a streaming teen is interrupted by her livid mother (played by a friend of Miller’s, Katrina Naficy) and throws her out of the house, only for Jessica to try and finish the song for her live streamers (the punchline). In the span of about thirty seconds, you get an entire story of a misbehaved teenager, a fed up mother, and a life that has gone down the drain in seconds (luckily none of this is real). That is the kind of imagination I love that comes out of these apps.

David Lynch: noted nonbeliever of watching feature films on one’s phone.

The idea that we’re able to watch feature films on our devices (much to the chagrin of directors like David Lynch) is not new, especially since the DVD age (and particularly the consumption of video files). If anything, applications like TikTok — when used as short story creating tools — feels like an answer to the ability to have any moving picture at our disposal at any time. We can watch features (or proper short films, too) on our phones, but now there’s that immediate satisfaction of quickly flipping through a few miniature instances of this, to better fit the time frame if we cannot devote ourselves to an entire feature at that moment. I don’t think that applications like TikTok will forever change film or anything, but it’s interesting to see that the obsession humans have had with quick cinematic reliefs has never gone away from the earliest days of film.

Once film was invented and short captures of our world (and stories) was all we could achieve, the medium became this never ending quest to keep discovering. That translated to the short films that stuck around, the television shows and spots that would come later, and additional evolutions. We still have all of those, but now we’re back to the quickest instances of cinematic indulgence for when we’re wrapping up our lunch breaks, winding down in bed, or on transit. In the same way that these applications have enhanced the photographical experience, cinema has this strange niche of a branch that can only continue to inspire storytellers and entertain the rest of us. Film as the art form and storytelling device that we know and love isn’t going anywhere. This is just one of its many offspring, and I have no problem cheering it on.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.

Social Media Video Making and Film Consumption