By danclemt / TikTok
Now part of the lives of over a billion users, TikTok has carved out a place for itself among the most popular social networks. Taking a page from the many food, beauty, fashion and book enthusiasts who favor the platform, movie fans are increasingly creating high-quality cinema-oriented content on TikTok. Is TikTok becoming a gateway to the big screen?
Now part of the lives of over a billion users, TikTok has carved out a place for itself among the most popular social networks. Taking a page from the many food, beauty, fashion and book enthusiasts who favor the platform, movie fans are increasingly creating high-quality cinema-oriented content on TikTok. Is TikTok becoming a gateway to the big screen?
Who said cinematic content wasn't suited to social media? While the format isn't necessarily the most obvious for relaying filmic images, in large part because of the resolution of the images on offer, the emergence of TikTok has enabled budding film buffs to experiment with creating short films and showing them. There's a new format taking the web by storm, boosted by TikTok and its ability to make short videos go viral with its algorithm.
On the Chinese social network, high-quality cinema-oriented content is upstaging some of the dancing clips and even sparking new trends. One such example was the "Wes Anderson" trend. This trend, driven by the song "Obituary" composed by Alexandre Desplat for the film "The French Dispatch," sees content creators delightfully turn out short films in the style of director Wes Anderson: symmetrical shots, lots of color, a retro aesthetic, offbeat humor, frozen facial expressions, and a mix of static shots and close-ups. Such tributes have racked up over 275 million views, if the hashtag #wesandersontrend on TikTok is anything to go by. The keyword #wesanderson has garnered over two billion views on the app. The soundtrack chosen to accompany the various montages of this trend, Alexandre Desplat's "Obituary," has been used in over 211,200 videos on TikTok at the time of writing.
The "Wes Anderson" trend appears to be an international phenomenon and has helped some creators achieve millions of views. Tutorials have even been published on the social network to help creators make a famous "Wes Anderson-style" montage themselves.
This isn't the first trend linked to cinema to appear on the Chinese social network. TikTok has in fact encouraged its movie-minded users to create content, notably for the Cannes Film Festival, with which the platform is an official partner. The TikTok Short Film competition sees some creators receive awards for their short films.
Just as with other universes on the app that see users add the suffix "-Tok" to define a specific milieu and help other users more easily find content related to the theme, such as AstroTok, BeautyTok and BookTok, the FilmTok sphere attracts an impressive share of users, with over 27.4 billion views.
Some creators have even decided to specialize in this type of content creation, and in what they call "acting" or "POV" ('point of view'). In France, the creator YEUX ÉBÈNES, followed by 2.8 million subscribers, has created a playlist "Scénarios by Yeux Ébènes" made up of ten videos exceeding 100,000 views and sometimes even reaching up to three million views, where she shows off her acting chops to various prompts (in French). And the feedback is largely positive: "I felt like it was a trailer, I want to watch the movie now," wrote Foxes_88 commenting on the video "#Pov: Digital hypocrisy..." by Yeux Ébènes.
Other creators post POV videos exploring different genres including horror, romcoms and more.
Cinematok, FilmTok, Acting, POV.... on TikTok, aspiring directors, actors and actresses have built up a whole realm for fans of the art form around the world. Some creators are even taking advantage of the platform and using it as a springboard for an acting career, such as Esteban Vial and Béatrice Harrods, among others. With over a billion users worldwide, and the growing interest of film studios, TikTok may well have a starring role to play in the world of film.
