This week: Why lip syncing videos are the engine of pop culture, the price of Quibi, and changing the titles of movies for feeds. Favor: Is this newsletter going to your Promotions tab in Gmail? Either move one Stupefy email from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab or add mgardner@gethighfield.com to your Google Contacts. And remember to tell your friends to sign up right here. Let's get to it.
Lip syncing is now the engine of pop culture
On Sunday, Jungkook, one of the members of the wildly popular Korean boy band BTS, posted a short video to the band's official Twitter account during which he goofily lip syncs and dances along to Billie Eilish's smash "bad guy."One million people are "talking about" this video, according to Twitter. Lip syncing videos have fueled the popularity of TikTok, the most popular app among teenagers; the biggest song of the year, "Old Town Road;" and now Instagram's latest update to its most popular format, Stories. It's a simple format that is increasingly becoming the engine for mobile video popularity, teenage creativity, media technology business models and hit singles. It's a democratic spring board for some of the most creative uses of mobile phones by amateurs. And with Instagram's new feature, lip syncing videos may become even more central to teen culture. Last week, Instagram unveiled Story lyrics, a new type of sticker that lets you display lyrics on your video Story synced to a soundtrack you’ve added. The feature was announced through a video starring Eilish herself. TikTok followed with its own text-on-video feature release last week.
From TechCrunch: "Typically, creators had to use Snapchat, Instagram Stories, or desktop editing software to add text [to TikTok videos]. Creators are sure to find plenty of hilarious use cases for text on TikTok, and it could help replace the common trope of writing captions on paper and holding them up during clips."So what exactly is it about lip syncing videos that make them so irresistibly watchable on mobile? Take this video by TikTok wunderkind @tinkerprincess0 that's been viewed on Twitter almost 4.5 million times.
The key to lip syncing videos catching on, which this simple video shows, is their combination of silliness and polish. The polish comes from the music. Real pop hits are a simple hack to mimic a professional video. But the act of lip syncing is goofy, casual and self-deprecating, a way to show the less serious side of your personality that younger people are more likely to share on social media than their perfection-chasing older counterparts. This format is a democratic platform for creativity. Whereas in the past polished special effects-driven videos would only be accessible to professionals, mobile phones have opened the door for lip syncing to become an easy and fun way for anyone to make polished yet goofy videos. People freaked out at how @tinkerprincess0 managed to make her self move "like an animated character." Apparently all she did was film herself at 2x speed but move as slowly as possible to achieve the animation-like effect. Any teen with a song and a phone is now a studio. Instagram has experienced a teen phenomenon threat before from Snapchat. So it stole Stories.
Now, the app that is constantly looking for ways to get people to use the it more often has borrowed a play from TikTok. Expect to see much more lip syncing on your phone for a good while.
Speaking of mobile video, Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, will cost $5 a month with short ads and $7 a month with no ads. This is one of the most interesting things to watch: will people pay for mobile video? (The Verge)
More Quibi: Steven Spielberg is making a horror series for the service that people can only stream at night. (Variety)
And even more: Quibi will offer a two-week free trial period and have eight “super premium” productions (which Katzenberg still called “movies”) ready to view. After that, there will be 26 more “lighthouse” (read: signature projects) productions that will roll out, every other Monday, for the first year. (Variety)
Read about Bryan Goldberg, the media punching bag who now owns the best blog of all time, Gawker. (Bloomberg)
Madonna did NOT like her New York Times Magazine cover story. (Instagram)
Are new chat features coming to Fortnite's mobile app? (Twitter)
Will movies have different titles for different feeds?
Last week, a critically acclaimed small-budget Swedish film from 2014 became a meme. The film, Force Majeure, like sold fewer than 100,000 tickets. But as a 30-second meme it was viewed 13.6 million times. seen probably 100,000. The clip shows a family slowly reacting to a fast-approaching avalanche. In fact, that's basically the premise of the movie. The movie, while well reviewed, didn't take off. But what fueled the 5-year-old clip into meme status were the bite-sized hyper-relatable summaries attached to it by regular people who ostensibly don't work at movie studios:
"Me watching a bad situation and doing nothing till the final hour:""this is exactly how america reacts to global warming""This is what every day at work is like for me"
Max Read at New York used this moment as a jumping off point to explore the possibilities that movies will eventually have different titles for different feeds: one title for theaters, another for Apple TV, another for Netflix, another for social media, for instance. In a few ways, it's already begun. Years ago, the underrated Tom Cruise sci-fi action flick Edge of Tomorrow was renamed Live. Die. Repeat. its digital video-on-demand release. It's not only a better name but also actually proved more successful on VOD services. So successful in fact that it led to a sequel for a movie that came and went in the box office. But Read wonders if the Force Majeure moment could be an inflection point for the marketing of movies. He writes: "Maybe the distributors of Force Majeure missed a big opportunity here, titling the film after a somewhat obscure clause in contracts (a French phrase, no less!), rather than something that made the movie’s premise immediately apprehensible — something, well, meme-y.
What I’m saying is, maybe the English title of Force Majeure should have been 'If This Was Your Man What Would You Do?'"It's not that far-fetched to one day see different titles for the same movie on different platforms. Netflix is known to optimize everything, including the thumbnails (posters) used to get people to click on a movie or TV show. Is it that much a step to change that title for different suers or different audiences? What would this look like? Something like: "'Force Majeure' for the cineastes of Film Forum; 'OMG I Can’t Believe This Dude Did That' for the feed-like Netflix scroll; and 'Avalanche Movie Meme Swedish Tormund Ski Trip' for the Apple TV search engine."It looks like the BBC is already labelling YouTube clips for its show Fleabag to generate more clicks on that feed: one scene has been renamed "Awkward Family Dinner" for YouTube, another "Looking Too Good At A Funeral."
Further reading: — "We Were Wrong"
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