Brock Davis, Vine Master

It’s taken me a while to warm up to Vine.

I’d like to be able to say that there was a principled reason for my initial dislike. Something grandiose and a shade Ludditetastic, like “I don’t think you can show enough in 6 seconds to make it a valuable form of communication,” or some such oversimplification.  But that’s sort of what I said about Twitter years ago, and people keep demolishing that idea by having interesting conversations in 140-character bursts. So I’m probably forced to be honest and say that I was mostly just being cranky. And that I was demoralized by/jealous of how effectively and economically some folks can communicate an idea. Since my idea communications are rarely either of those. (OK, fine. It’s not Vine; it’s me. Happy now?)

Once I’d worked through my initial unhappiness, though, I began to realize that it was playing directly into the hands of one of my all-time favorite things: Stop-Motion Animation. And that there were some real visual geniuses out there.

Take Brock Davis, for example:

See? Genius. I dare anyone to tell me that 6-second visual gag didn’t put a smile on their Friday face. And there’s more where that came from (with the promise of lots more). It’s not particularly earth-shattering, I know. But it sure is clever. And while I can’t say I’ve run into any profundities as of yet — and while I will readily admit that Vine’s signal-to-noise ratio is about as skewed as Twitter’s  or Facebook’s — there are gems aplenty.

Happy Vining!

Thanks to the good folks at This is Colossal, who have been (understandably) Brock Davis fans for some time. Oh, and for those who clicked on this link expecting something vintneresque? My apologies. (Also, heh.)