Lots of people have been taking up the new Vine app that lets you record 6 second videos and gotten really enthusiastic about it. Some people have done some really creative things with it and the 6-second limit kinda forces you to be creative. It reminds me of the early days of Twitter where people were really creative with what they could do in 140 chars.
But…you can probably tell by the tone of my voice…I don’t really get it. The app is really clever in how it lets you record and do animation and so on, but I just haven’t taken to it. I don’t know if it’s that 6 seconds is too short, or if its the looping that means you don’t get to dwell on the message, or if it’s just that I’m not a visual person and I simply don’t ‘get it’. Or some or all three of those.
What I have really taken to is a little app called ‘Takes‘. Takes rolls video while you line up a photo and then, at the point at which you take the photo, it saves a snapshot of video from around the time you took the photo. The app uses information from your smartphone’s movement sensors to decide how long the video clip should be. The app then lets you select video snippets and stitches them together, with an optional soundtrack, for you.
Yes, the uses are totally different to that of Vine, the still photos it takes aren’t great, and the pre-loaded soundtracks are cheesey, but for me, Takes is a magic way of making little documentary videos.
And here’s a little video of some ducks on our decking on holiday to show you what it does, followed by one of our trip to the aquarium (yes, I made the mistake of doing most of this in portrait…sorry!)