What We Learned From Creating Our First Vine Video

Here at MONSTERS, we love to try new things and get our creative juices flowing. One arena where we especially love to experiment: Social Media. Recently, we decided to try our furry monster hands at Vine.

What is Vine?

Vine is a video-sharing site owned by Twitter. For those of you who’ve never heard of Vine before, here’s the site description: “Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see.”

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Benefits of Vine for Brands

With all the social media and video-sharing sites out there, what interested us about Vine? A few things:

• It’s Simple – Typically, a ton of time and effort go into making brand videos. But Vine is quick and raw. Simplicity can be a great thing for brands when it comes to social media.
• It’s Digestible – Since Vine videos are only 6 seconds long, they are easy for people to quickly watch and digest. Who doesn’t have 6 seconds to spare?
• It’s Looping – The looping nature of Vine videos—they play through and then jump back to the beginning and play again—makes them hypnotic and addictive.

We figured Vine could be a fast, simple and fun way to present our company to the online world. So we jumped in…

Challenges of Creating Vine Videos

Now we’ve done a lot of video work (you can see some of it out on our Vimeo page). But that was professional video work. Vine is another beast entirely.

The professional polish we like to put on our videos is not available on Vine. That’s not what Vine is all about. In fact, the amateur quality of Vine videos is part of the social site’s charm.

The challenging thing about Vine (and what makes it cool) is it straps you with some serious limitations. They include:

• • Length – You have to tell a story or get a message across in 6 seconds. That is not easy.
  • Filming – The Vine app that you use to create videos requires you to hold your finger on the screen of your device to record. That results in a jittery picture.

*Though (by the end) we did discover a workaround for this: You can record videos on your device as you normally would, then import them into Vine. 

• • Editing – While the Vine app allows you to trim the length of clips, you can’t do a whole lot of editing tricks with it. Meaning what you film is what you get.

*Again, the import ability is something of a workaround for this. But as we mentioned the simple, low-rent quality of Vine is part of its charm.

Using Limitations to Your Advantage

While these limitations may scare you off from Vine, they are a part of what makes it such a fun, creative challenge. Limitations are often good in that sense—they make you think differently and find workarounds.

Sidenote: Our favorite MONSTER example of the creative power of limitations is Jaws, a movie that would have turned out totally different if Speilberg wasn’t limited by a malfunctioning mechanical shark. Read that story here.

Getting Back to Our Vine Video…

So we came up with what we thought was a decent little concept and set out to create our first Vine video. The results: pretty awful. Delightfully and addictively awful, but awful nonetheless. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Hmm. Back to the drawing board. Maybe the video needs more of a stop-motion animation feel. Here’s our second stab at it:

Yeah, not great. But there is a comical charm to the videos. Like a low-budget horror movie that’s so poorly produced and frenetically put together it makes you smile the whole time you’re watching it.

More importantly, we had a blast testing out Vine. And ultimately that’s what social media (and marketing in general) is all about. When you enjoy what you’re doing and when you’re energized by it, that comes through to people.

Embrace and Enjoy the Social Marketing Journey

We’ll definitely be jumping back in the Vine waters and making more videos. While our first Vines may not be great, we love them anyway. Like that growling green creature that lives in our basement, they’re part of the MONSTER family.

A final positive from our first Vine experience: We met this thing. It was so good in the video, we decided to offer it a full-time position. Welcome to the team, Idea Monster!