Six-Second Loops on Vine

Six seconds, then again

Vine, the video app owned by Twitter, records clips of up to six seconds and plays them on a loop, over and over, until the viewer scrolls on.

Most of what gets posted is comedy. A few businesses use it well, and the best of them have something in common: work that visibly changes in front of the camera.

A cake goes from bare sponge to piped roses. A deck goes down board by board in fast motion. A tiled wall appears where there was bare board.

If your business produces that kind of change most days, six seconds may suit it better than any other format.

Why the loop suits a transformation

A photograph shows a moment. Two photographs, before and after, can look like two different places. A loop shows one place changing, and then shows it again.

People watch a good loop several times without deciding to, because it restarts before they have scrolled away. Each pass shows the change once more.

Fast motion does the rest. A day's work compressed into six seconds reads as skill, without anyone having to explain it.

Businesses it suits

• Bakers and decorators finishing a cake or a tray of pastries.
• Builders and installers whose work changes a room in a day.
• Landscapers and gardeners turning bare ground into planting.
• Salons and barbers with a striking before and after.
• Makers whose product takes shape on a bench.
• Cleaners and restorers with a visible difference.

The fourth needs care. A before and after of a person needs that person's agreement, preferably in writing, and some customers will not want to appear at all.

How a loop gets made

Vine records while a finger stays on the screen and pauses when it lifts. A series of short touches, minutes or hours apart, becomes stop motion without any editing software.

The phone has to stay in exactly one place. A clamp on a railing or a shelf at the right height is what turns a jumpy sequence into a smooth one.

Vine can also import video from the phone, so a time-lapse filmed with the camera app can be trimmed to six seconds instead.

Plan the last frame as well as the first. A loop where the finish leads naturally back to the start plays as one continuous piece.

Plan a handful, not a stream

A Vine account does not need daily posting. Five or six strong loops a season, each built around a job that shows change, will say more than a stream of filler.

Make a short list before the season starts: which jobs, which angle, where the phone goes, and who takes the frames. Then nobody has to remember on the day.

Match each loop to one service on your website, so it has an obvious home there later: decks with decks, kitchens with kitchens.

A worked example

A rooftop garden builder in the city turns flat roofs on condos, offices and restaurants into gardens, with decking, raised planters, irrigation and planting.

Photographs never showed the change well. A before shot of bare gravel and an after shot of a finished garden looked like two different roofs, and clients said so.

Last spring the crew lead began fixing a phone to the same railing at the start of each job and touching the screen for a moment every hour or so.

In six seconds, gravel becomes decking, decking becomes planters, the planters turn green, and the loop jumps back to bare gravel.

The company posts one loop for each finished job, embeds the best on the project pages of its own website, and keeps every original in a folder named for the job.

Permission and sound

A loop filmed at a client's property is a picture of their home or business. Ask before posting, and keep anything that gives away the address out of the frame.

Most clients are happy to agree, and asking first is what keeps them happy.

Use your own sound or none at all. A popular song behind a business loop belongs to someone else, and a loop can be taken down over it.

Point the profile at the website

Someone who enjoys a loop and wants to know more looks at the profile next. Put the website address there, beside a short description of the work and the area you cover.

Share each loop to Twitter and Facebook from the app as it goes up, so followers there see it too.

Then embed the best ones on your own service pages, using the embed code Vine provides, so they work on the page where people decide.

The loop catches attention; the website holds the prices, the service area and the quote form.

Keep the originals

An app is not an archive. Keep the full footage and the finished loop on a computer you control, backed up with everything else.

Originals can become something else later: a longer video for the website, a sequence of stills for a proposal, a loop for whatever format comes next.

Name each file for the job and the date. Six seconds of decking is useless in two years if nobody knows which building it was.

The counter-case

Not every business changes in front of a camera. An accountant, a consultant or a clinic has little to show in six seconds, and should not force it.

Vine's audience also leans young, and a business whose customers do not use it may do better putting the same footage on its website and Facebook page.

And a loop does not replace the photographs a gallery needs. It sits beside them, showing the change that stills cannot.

Where the work does change visibly, plan a handful of loops, point the profile at the website and keep every original.

Before the first loop

1. Pick a job that visibly changes in a day.
2. Fix the phone in one spot.
3. Touch to record every hour or so.
4. Plan the last frame to lead into the first.
5. Add your web address to the profile.
6. Embed the best loops on your service pages.
7. Keep every original on your own computer.

Step two is the one that makes a loop watchable. Stop motion from a phone held by hand jumps with every frame; from a phone fixed in place, it looks smooth and deliberate.

Unedited video, streamed as it happens, is a different tool, covered in live video from a phone, broadcast to anyone.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.