Russell showed me an app called One Second Everyday. You shoot one second of video everyday and it stitches them together into a little film.
Russell posted his a few weeks ago.
So I started to make one, with the objective of making a better one than him, obviously.
I'm pleased with that. Despite working at an ad agency famous for making brilliant films, I've never been very good at making video. But making one second every day is surprisingly easy. And they seem to fit together in a nicely.
It's a good way of remembering things. I like this shortened version called 'Holiday'.
It's incredible to think each of those little clips is just one second long. Turns out you can cram a lot of detail into just one second.
Which brings me to another thing Russell and I were discussing - how come films are getting longer? YouTube seems to have allowed creatives to endulge their long form ambitions and make commercials that are 2 minutes long rather than 30 seconds. These longer ads aren't really any better, either, just bloated.
The trend for longer ads is odd given that people skip the ads anyway and watch the real YouTube clip. Why don't people concentrate on making a brilliant 5 second ad that would work with the pre-roll, not against it?
Modern media is full of this shorter stuff. Everywhere you go there are "digital six sheets" effectively press ads that wiggle about for 5 seconds.
Vine, Instagram and the like have loads of interesting content and should be breeding a culture where the 6 second video is king. Animated GIFs are internet catnip and are just about the shortest form of "film" you can make.
All that and the usual blah about attention spans shortening, media increasing, faster modern world blah blah.
Short - really short - film making would seem to be a skill worth learning. In his Campaign column Russell mentions a brilliant article called Trapped In The Loop with this incredible clip of all of LeBron James' scores in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
As Russell says that is "the most interesting filmic idea you’ve seen in years".
And it's maybe 5 seconds long?
Maybe we should make 5 second films about the internet and how people use it.
(I have have no idea what the convention is for crediting gifs. Sorry if I've got it wrong.)
How about trailers for movies, or the "Previously, on…" summaries at the start of TV episodes, as examples of dense film-making? Have a complete story told in snippets like that…
Posted by: Phil | Aug 27, 2013 at 22:03