Tribeca Vine film contest winners are delightful, disturbing
Short Vine videos get a moment of glory with recognition from a special Tribeca Film Festival competition. The winners range from whimsical to weird.
When Twitter first released the 6-second Vine video format, a lot of people wondered just how much information you could convey in such a short amount of time. It turns out the answer is a lot, if you do it right.
A Tribeca Film Festival competition has brought a sense of legitimacy to the new realm of Vine filmmaking. Some of the winners are wild, wacky, and just a little bit worrying.
The "Genre" category welcomed everything from Westerns to sci-fi to LOLcats. The winner, however, is definitely in the horror genre. "LazerAndDonald Close Shave" crams a lot of creepy into just 6 seconds. Juror and famous filmmaker Penny Marshall says, "The use of lighting is amazingly set for this 6 second Vine."
The contest put a call out through Twitter and racked up 400 entries that the panel of judges had to comb through. Besides Marshall, the jurors also included actor Adam Goldberg and comedy Web site 5-Second Films. The winners each received a $600 prize, $100 for each second of film.
The "Animate" category is described as being for "filmmakers that saw Vine as the perfect medium for some creative animation and don't want to deal with the live-action riffraff." The winner cleaned a ghost out of his garage with some clever perspective work and good sound effects.
The "Auteur" category shares a creative vision involving a carton of eggs, a toy soldier, and a tragic outcome. Goldberg calls the egg Vine, "A cute and well-done egg anime." It may be cute at first, but it quickly dives for the dark side.
The final honoree needed more than 6 seconds to tell a story, resulting in a creative stop-motion trilogy following the escapades of a book bug with burrowing tendencies. Vine filmmaker Chris Donlon took the "Series" category win with "The Book Beetle Trilogy."
The Tribeca contest shows off the potential for Vine as a storytelling medium. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before we get a full-length feature film told in 6-second chunks of Vine.