25 Edits That Define the Modern Internet Video

And create the vocabulary for an absurd, ingenious art form.

Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; @contrachloe; @donte.colley, @chaeyeonbot

Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; @contrachloe; @donte.colley, @chaeyeonbot

They say good editing goes unnoticed. Online, it goes viral. It's clear in the all-time internet videos: Editing defines the artful, humor, and power of online storytelling. None of the genre'due south inherent absurdity would click into place without an editor's eye for a perfectly devastating zoom, a video cut short a millisecond too early on, or a freeze-frame right at the moment of climax, with text overlaid to really underline the point.

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And yet, the internet video has long lacked definition as a discrete genre, with its own tropes, techniques, and history. Like any art course, this one has been shaped in office by the technology bachelor at the fourth dimension. In compiling this list of influential video edits, we began in the last days of YouTube's monopoly, shortly before the birth of the now-deceased app Vine. The online video has, of course, existed for decades, but information technology was the smartphone — and the proliferation of apps to come out of it — that made editing more sophisticated and more accessible to creators than information technology had ever been. All of a sudden, everyone could shoot and edit a video, building the vocabulary of what that could await like: transition videos, lip syncs, and greenish-screen-driven storytelling began to cohere as distinct subgenres. That's but accelerated in the age of TikTok, an app that offers more and easier editing tools for users than whatsoever that came earlier it.

Online video is an inherently communal form; it's defined by thousands of people iterating on the aforementioned idea. Every one time in a while, though, there'southward a spring forward. Every video on this list represents an evolution in the form or exemplifies a particularly influential editing style — whether the creator was one of the first to endeavour it, or only pulled off a jaw-dropping editing feat all their ain.

YouTube, 2012

Lip-syncing is everywhere at present, thanks to TikTok and its precursors Musical.ly and Dubsmash, which had special features to make creating a seamless lip-sync a hell of a lot easier. But this detail i, a shot-for-shot recreation of Beyoncé's "Countdown" video, was made before all that. A masterpiece made by and starring then-16-year-old Ton Exercise-Nguyen, it combines his flawless lip-sync performance with key editing elements nosotros however see over and over in mod viral content, achieved with a digital camera and the editing program Vegas. The bulk of the video is shot in mural, merely Practise-Nguyen integrates vertical shots throughout the video — especially innovative in a time when many hadn't accustomed that the typical manner people hold their phones is the easiest way to film with one. There'due south a shot panning beyond a half-dozen vertical frames of Do-Nguyen dancing that looks like it could take been made in 2021 (probably using Trio, the TikTok filter that gives you a cohort of backup dancers who are just duplicated versions of yourself). And and so, of course, there's the Snuggie Practice-Nguyen wears throughout: One TikTok trend last yr involved recreating album covers using household items. The "Countdown" Snuggie would accept worked perfectly, nearly a decade later. —Madison Malone Kircher

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Vine, 2014

Graphic: @TumblingIsLife1

Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka once summarized her Twitter video style every bit "Okay, here's the weird role. Practiced-bye." It's a perfect description for the videos, now common across Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, in which the clip ends right as the activeness hits. That feeling of What the hell did I just watch overlaps with Well, I simply have to watch that again — a winning combination for both creator and audience. "Back at information technology again at Krispy Kreme," a micro-video from Vine, is the platonic platonic of this technique, which was popularized on the belatedly app. In the prune, a guy holds upward a Krispy Kreme lid to the camera; says, "Back at it again at Krispy Kreme"; and does a back handspring, knocking a sign off the wall. Except you lot don't really see the sign autumn off the wall. You see the handspring and the initial crash of body and neon and and then black. That'south all you go. It's impossible not to watch information technology again. —MMK

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Vine, 2015

Graphic: @francesformayor

Sometimes y'all just need a little emphasis. The extreme zoom is ane of the easiest and virtually constructive editing tricks and a fixture across content platforms. It can be used to subvert expectations and emphasize a reaction. The camera moves in and establishes, or otherwise breaks, the fourth wall — similar to the cinematography of mockumentaries like The Office. This wordless 2015 Vine past the creator who now posts under @francesformayor was i of the first to get pop: Dancing to a-ha's "Take on Me," she whips her face around to reveal a mouth full of braces and an inscrutable smiling. In 2016, Snapchat made the editing effect ubiquitous by calculation a one-finger digital zoom. Information technology follows your thumb as you record (instead of requiring a second hand to pinch the screen), allowing for spontaneity. Four years out from the death of Vine, TikTok likewise offers a one-handed option and even has a confront-zoom effect that uses facial-recognition software to automatically hone in, kicking off several viral trends — not to mention the career of TikToker Bella Poarch, who uses the feature to make expressive lip syncs. —Zoë Haylock

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Vine, 2015

A YouTuber was trying to brand a web series when he accidentally made i of the greatest Vines of all time. Information technology was 2015, and during a man-on-the-street segment, he walked up to a kid, stuck a microphone in his confront, and asked, "Who's the hottest Uber driver y'all've e'er had?" The child, mishearing "Uber driver," responded, "I never went to Oovoo Javer." What makes the "Oovoo Javer" video funny isn't the mixup, simply the way the editor freezes the frame, adds early-internet text on screen, zooms in, and sets it to a piece of plucky, upbeat stock music. The vibe is public admission–fashion irony, vaporwave without trying too hard.

The freeze-and-zoom-in edit is an extension of a similarly beloved internet video edit: the cut to blackness at the height of the narrative that allows the viewer to only imagine the rest of the video. Unlike the cutting to black, the freeze-and-zoom-in edit lingers on the very all-time moment — which is essentially the basis of TikTok's wildly popular "Oh no" trend, in which users edit videos of themselves about to get hurt and freeze before the viewer tin can see it. "Oovoo Javer" could be considered the original "Oh no" moment. —Rebecca Jennings

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Vine, 2015

Gen Z may have retired the reaction GIF, but reaction videos are even so a fixture of internet culture. A quick cut from one video to another — a juxtaposition easily achieved with almost editing programs, including the ones built into TikTok — uses the aforementioned logic as images posted side-past-side on Tumblr or Twitter: Putting unrelated images next to each other can tell a story or state a joke. "Ii shots of vodka" is the ultimate insert-your-reaction video. It takes a clip from Sandra Lee'southward cooking show, Semi-Homemade, in which the host manifestly pours more than than the "two shots of vodka" the recipe calls for. In some versions, the suspense of watching the shots stream out of the bottle is emphasized: The editor might make the pour louder or loop the clip. Only the original footage of Lee's knockout serving alone is enough to indicate what's going to happen next. The cut facilitates a thrilling millisecond of recognition before the reaction clip comes in and says it all — that was too much vodka. —ZH

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Musical.ly, 2015

A fashion of lip-syncing videos came out of the app Musical.ly in the mid-2010s. It involved hand choreography accompanying jerky camera movements that emphasized the beats of the song. And, crucially, the app made it possible to sing along to a song in slow motion, so automatically speed upwards the footage. Information technology gave the whole thing an energetic feel and immune users to create clean, smooth transitions. Ariel Martin, whose username is Baby Ariel, was an skilful in the grade. Known for her buoyant facial expressions and hand motions, she became one of the app'southward kickoff breakout stars by busting out Musical.lys daily. The app was somewhen bought by TikTok, which nevertheless allows you to choose the speed of your sound while you moving-picture show, allowing for precise choreography (even when that choreography was actually just striking unlike poses). Some techniques that Baby Ariel helped popularize — shaking the photographic camera, swinging it back and forth, and choreographing moves that match the lyrics — are prevalent in TikTok dances today. —ZH

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Vine, 2015

Approximately 7,000 years ago, in 2015, Logan Paul hadn't still become the guy known for things like vlogging a dead body in Japan or platforming Alex Jones. Back then, he was merely an up-and-coming Vine star edifice a name for himself with stunty gag videos and flexes directed at an audience of predominantly young female viewers. In one of those early outings, "Kitty Cat Car Spring," Paul appears to contrivance speeding cars on a freeway to rescue a kitten. Writer Caroline Moss, who profiled Paul that year, says it was created with a combination of thruway footage and a greenscreen — a proper cinematic action scene in six seconds. It'southward a testament to the creativity of early Viners, who were able to do and then much in so fiddling fourth dimension. Nowadays, TikTok makes it easy to practise modest light-green-screen work with a built-in filter, simply this Vine is no crude endeavour; it's technical. Videos like "Kitty True cat Car Jump" made the later era of messy content, like Emma Chamberlain's, that much more than of a 180. —MMK

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Graphic: Quenlin Blackwell

Around the same fourth dimension wacky confront filters were a de-facto feature of every social media app, there was the "That'southward my stance!" Vine. The video, popularized by iconic Viner Quenlin Blackwell in 2015, is a vi-second prune from the flavour nine reunion of The Real Housewives of Orange County in which Vicki Gunvalson defends her perchance cancer-faking boyfriend to her onetime best friend, Tamra Judge. "How do yous know what's proficient for me?" Gunvalson shouts. "That's my opinion!" screams Estimate. (Bonus: the stunned expressions of castmate Shannon Beador and host Andy Cohen.) This is all standard fare for a Bravo reunion, but the Vine-ified version adds filters that arrive appear as though every person'south face is melting similar a Dalí clock, with big issues eyes and stretched-out foreheads, their voices dropped to an uncannily deep octave.

The distortion filters used on the housewives — which appear to be the same ones that accept come standard effect with Apple's Photo Booth app since the mid-2000s — seem crude to our contemporary eyeballs. Simply the legacy of ironic, funhouse facial distortions is notwithstanding all over the cyberspace, from PewDiePie YouTube thumbnails to edits skewering Drag Race contestant fights. Automatic distortion and facial recognition has get far more sophisticated in the years since, so much so that dazzler filters are influencing plastic-surgery trends. Making your face look weird (or gorgeous) has been an integral part of self-presentation online ever since Snapchat made filters mandatory for any camera app worth using. The more than interesting use, though, is in the millions of videos where people put on filters in order to play multiple characters, allowing them to control a narrative while still leaning on the comedy of an exaggerated face up. —RJ

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YouTube, 2016

The 2007 film Bee Movie'due south runtime is certainly longer than five minutes and 29 seconds, simply this YouTube edit of it gets you from commencement to finish in but that. The concept is simple: Every time somebody says "bee," the prune speeds upwards past 15 percent. The word is used twice in the prologue narration alone, and then the characters already sound similar cartoon chipmunks by the time they showtime speaking. It'southward a slice of surrealist art, using a film that's already about the relationship betwixt a talking bee and a human. (Call it "beestiality.") This video didn't invent the concept — an earlier version, which used but the trailer for Bee Flick, also went viral — merely information technology helped found the idea in the world of net-video editing in perpetuity. You can now find sped-up versions of everything from Star Wars to Ariana Grande songs. In each, the speed editing becomes the joke, and there's a satisfaction to the consistency of knowing exactly how the video will play out. It feels similar to a more recent video edit trend on TikTok chosen "Poland is everywhere," which involves manipulating the colors on a tiny slice of any video to reveal the carmine and white of the Polish flag. Speed editing created an umbrella category for very literal editing techniques where a general dominion is applied consistently to video content. —MMK

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Douyin, 2017

In 2017, the "Karma's a bowwow" challenge swept across the Chinese video platform Douyin (a TikTok predecessor that's also endemic by TikTok'southward parent company and is currently just accessible to people in mainland People's republic of china). Lip-syncing to audio from a Riverdale fan edit, of all things, participants start the video dressed in nothing special, faces unmade. They mouth, "Oh, well. Karma's a bitch" — then, usually with the wave of a scarf or bathrobe in front end of the camera, reappear looking hot, with a new outfit, perfect makeup, hair done, a filter to make their pare look extra smoothen, and perhaps a wearisome-motion effect to enhance the drama. Its predecessor, Vine'southward "Don't Judge Challenge," came a few years earlier and involved teens making themselves look intentionally bad before revealing their hotter alter-egos. With "Karma's a bitch," the transitions become slightly cleaner, similar to the reveal videos we run into on TikTok today. The devices change but the general concept remains the same: a seamless transformation from one wait to some other. The fun is watching on repeat trying to observe a glitch in the matrix, a visible rip in the transition. The all-time edits return this job fruitless. —MMK

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Musical.ly, 2017

Y'all ever gyre by a video that seems like it's but going to be someone taking a video of themselves, only and then it of a sudden looks similar they peeled off their own confront or disappeared into a mirror, and you lot're like, Wait, what just happened, and why tin't I stop watching information technology? You tin thank Musical.ly for those. Pretty much everyone on that app tried hypnotic transitions — a surprisingly lo-fi method wherein you picture show for a few seconds, pause, then position yourself and your telephone so that the transition looks cool and repeat as necessary. Only one of its true masters was then-teenager Isaiah Howard, who was known for his impossibly intricate editing, and who kickoff went super-viral on his 60-second video set to the vocal "Fond to My Ex," which took seven hours to film. Since then, the torch has been passed on to TikTokers, who have expanded the genre with a whole bevy of visual tricks (like this i, where the user takes off his own head and spins it in the air). Some are done with clever camerawork, similar Howard'south, while others are edited using desktop tools like Premiere Pro. —RJ

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YouTube, 2017

"Shooting Stars" emerged during a transitory menses. It was January 23, 2017 — less than a calendar week later Vine had ceased operations and more than a year before TikTok would launch in the U.S. There was no default platform for super-shortform videos. And nonetheless, life found a way. The start version of the meme, a video titled "Fatty man does astonishing dive - Shooting Stars," was uploaded to YouTube by a user named All Ski Casino and repurposed a clip that showed … well, you can probably effigy it out. The edit caught the attention of the r/videos subreddit, where it quickly spawned hundreds of imitators — including a version in which Nicki Minaj shoots off to Prague.

The construction is easy to grasp. Accept a clip of someone falling or spinning or generally goofing information technology. Then, at the exact moment of maximum goofage, freeze the video, extract whoever is goofing, and show them floating through trippy visuals while diggings the Bag Raiders song "Shooting Stars." In 2017, one would accept needed basic noesis of a plan like Adobe After Furnishings to brand these videos; at present, the meme feels like the epitome for the TikTok filters that allow you effortlessly stencil out a video'south subject and change their surroundings — such as Light-green Screen, which replaces the groundwork. That'due south the existent legacy of "Shooting Stars." —Brian Feldman

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Twitter, 2018

Yous'd exist hard-pressed to scroll through Twitter or TikTok without eventually stumbling upon a fan edit, a montage put together from clips of a celebrity looking particularly attractive or talented. While fanmade videos have been around for years, the viral 2018 "Chaeyeon Tingz" past Twitter user @chaeyeonbot pushed the format in a shorter, snappier, and more shareable direction. The video pairs photos and videos of South Korean singer and extra Chaeyeon with the confident sound of Nicki Minaj'south unmarried "Barbie Tingz." Using rapid transitions, the 29-second clip packs in a visual résumé of Chaeyeon's commercial success, a video-game-style fight sequence where she knocks out hate comments with the power of a pretty face up, and a natural language-in-cheek slideshow that includes many clearly simulated pictures of her with other celebrities ("Yup, him as well, he would still wife me").

The key hither, every bit in virtually fan edits, is timing. Every motility — dancing, winking, a headline popping up on-screen — is meant to match the music, which gives the final product high replay value (the same reason that "Beyoncé always on beat" fan edits, which pair footage of Bey dancing with songs from dissimilar artists, are so satisfying). Circulating on Stan Twitter, "Chaeyeon Tingz" birthed a trend that lasted over a year every bit other K-pop fandoms practical the format to their faves. While the original video and about of its derivatives have been taken down for copyright infringement, it's still fondly remembered equally an icon among fan edits, which are now dedicated to everyone from late-night hosts to Hollywood stars. —Jennifer Zhan

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YouTube, 2018

Gag dubs were an early and prolific tendency in YouTube comedy videos, non least of all considering the technological bulwark to entry was and then low — anyone could mute a TV clip and dub their own audio on top. (Plus, YouTube by and large couldn't strip the sound from your post on copyright grounds if you redubbed it yourself.) The consequence was viral videos from creators like Jaboody Dubs and Bad Lip Reading, who applied comedic voiceover to footage from infomercials, sports broadcasts, and news. Vern Hass, known online equally @vernonator6497, cites old Billy Mays gag dubs as an inspiration behind his YouTube favorite "Wendy Williams except there's no talking," which takes clips of The Wendy Williams Show and renders them creepy and unfamiliar by wiping the soundscape of background dissonance. Instead of music and thanks, claps, and shouts from the audience, we see Wendy smack her lips and hear the sound echo through the cavernous studio. We hear an audience member shift in their chair. Nosotros hear a prison cell phone go off. This video presaged a trend of creators on YouTube and Twitter taking silent edits a step further and dubbing over famous reality-TV fights entirely with whispers (ASMR, weaponized) and influenced how some people tape their own, first-person content — as in the TikTok trend of applying Motorcar-Tune to your phonation while recounting an embarrassing anecdote, adding an extra layer of warped hilarity. —Rebecca Alter

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YouTube, 2018

Emma Chamberlain is the influencer who made information technology absurd to not appear perfect online. The vlogger — who got her first on YouTube in 2017, when she was 16 years old — helped popularize a self-referential video-editing style that seems effortless, like she really merely sets the camera to tape and gives her viewers whatever happens. This is, manifestly, not true, but the finished product makes yous feel similar Chamberlain leaves naught out; she goes out of her mode to include flubs, grossness, and goofiness. (In this video, she explains her contempo bout of diarrhea.) She'll label these scenes in her videos "me editing," a caption that signals to her viewers that this is the real her, the messy her backside the scenes who was in charge of editing all her own content (upward until recently, when she hired an editor to help her out). In 2019, the New York Times described her editing manner as "instinctual": "zooming, adding text to the screen and pausing to point out the best parts." Information technology's a tactic Chamberlain says she honed in on because it was what fabricated her friends laugh. Editing her content in a style that shows "flaws" and paints a "relatable" portrait is no more or less calculated than the content produced by creators who go a more manicured route, but by choosing to use imperfection equally her filter, she inspired a moving ridge of copycats. (YouTube search "vlogging like Emma Chamberlain.") Chamberlain'due south affect is about more than than being a person who doesn't edit out her burps or FaceTune her zits, though. Y'all don't go Charli D'Amelio filming TikTok dances wearing sweats in a messy sleeping accommodation without Chamberlain laying the groundwork. —MMK

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Vine, 2019

Professional dancer and original Viner Casey Frey is known for editing together narratives featuring himself playing numerous, equally ridiculous characters. In his primeval hit, 2016's "bad boi's," he stars as the titular, thirst-trapping bad boy and the girl he's flirting with. He eventually moved toward longer, more than circuitous Instagram videos that allowed him to improve merge his dance skills with his penchant for absurdism. His opus came in 2019 with the video "Get tf out of my mode type mode," set to the rails "GOMF" by DVBBS, in which Frey encounters a not bad (played by Frey), from whom he is saved by a third character (played once again past him) when he inspires him to trip the light fantastic toe. While his noodle-y dance moves are great, the genius lies in the editing — it creates a narrative climax in which the two Freys sync up their choreography, lending the whole thing an uncanny quality. Is information technology a metaphor for the battle between the superego and the ego or, equally some viewers accept theorized, a Marxist manifesto of the TikTok historic period? Who knows! Whatever information technology is, the ridiculousness transcends: "Become tf out of my way blazon way" has gone viral multiple times, inspiring its own TikTok claiming and launching thousands of memes. The conceit of ane person playing multiple characters is one that apps like Vine and TikTok made easy — see also erstwhile Viner Jay Versace, some other master of the class. Frey perfects it hither with his quick shifts in perspective, timed to his palpitating breast. —Eduardo Carmelo Dañobeytia

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Instagram, 2019

There are about a zillion videos on the cyberspace that employ text on-screen as their full general format, but none are equally joyous or inventive equally Donté Colley'southward, which combine raw dance talent with mesmerizing animation. The Toronto-based dancer began uploading videos of himself to his Instagram in 2018 in which he dances to fun music, then overlays each move with emojis — sparkling hearts spill out of his head while he smashes a negative thought with a little cartoon hammer, a burst of confetti exploding beyond the screen. Each video has its ain inspirational messages, like "You got this!" or "Continue going!" or sometimes "Get out cho feelings." (In 2019, Ariana Grande invited Colley to exist in the video for "Monopoly" and so she could use his edit style.)

There's essentially zero limit to what a text-on-screen video can expect like, from recipe tutorials to TikTok challenges where a person points to the space next to them and then adds text that pops upwardly on-screen, set to the beat of the music. Digital creators have been experimenting with it since the earliest days of internet virality (remember eBaum's Earth?), with notable trailblazers similar Pecker Wurtz calculation psychedelic graphics, text, and music to his frantic video essays. In the smartphone era, creating a text-on-screen video is as simple as Snapchatting a friend, and everything from font employ to timing can change its entire significant. These days, text on-screen is easy for even the Luddites amongst u.s., then doing it well is its own artistic feat — i where both text and visuals play off one another in a constant, winking feedback loop. —RJ

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TikTok, 2019

Graphic: @stinkyrattictok/TikTok

On its confront, a POV, or indicate-of-view video, is a relatively standard format — consider any GoPro footage, handheld documentary, or, well, a very large segment of porn, all of which capture a scene from a certain person's perspective. But on TikTok, the POV is collaborative, inventive, and weird as hell. No meme better exemplified the comedy of the class than Danielle Cohn dancing to Conductor's "I Don't Listen." Cohn, a teenaged Musical.ly-turned-TikTok star whose ascent to fame has been marked by several controversies (usually about her age and what is or isn't appropriate for it), uploaded the original in 2019. On its confront, in that location's nothing that special well-nigh the video; teenagers dance to songs in their bedchamber all the time on TikTok. What fabricated this particular video the genesis for such a creative explosion, is in ii strikingly aggressive hip thrusts she makes during the trip the light fantastic toe. Other TikTok users started "duetting" information technology — a characteristic that allows you to respond to a video by filming side-by-side — pretending to be thrown across the room by her hip motions, leaping onto a bed or confronting the floor in an adjacent frame, and creating the illusion that Danielle's hip is literally knocking them out. The existent blast came after the dance had get an enormous meme. People began to expand the joke, duetting Danielle as objects inside the room — "you're watching her from inside the Forever 21 bag," "you're the lice in Dani'due south pilus, "you're her bones" (at that place are audible cracks). In doing so, they combined TikTok's most important editing feature — the ability to remix, or "duet," what'south already been washed — with the platform'southward signature surrealism. —RJ

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TikTok, 2020

Graphic: @imcaucasianking

Absurdism, pure and simple. "Lorde Getting Sick From Pickles" is a brilliant example of a category of video popular on TikTok and often shared on Stan Twitter. User @imcaucasianking used intentionally shitty editing techniques to stitch together a deranged fiddling picture where the pop vocalizer Lorde is put in a comically mundane situation: She orders a cheeseburger at McDonald's (ready up with an exterior establishing shot equally just "Donald," with one arch) and ends up getting sent to the infirmary considering of a pickle-induced allergic reaction. The visuals do not cohere: A cutout video of Lorde talking is plopped onto a low-res stock photo of a McDonald's. A clip of a YouTuber biting into a burger is used to represent Lorde eating. Her face up is chroma-keyed green to indicate she's getting sick. A reaction video of Britney Spears running abroad from the photographic camera represents a worker fetching the "manager," who is "played" by a popular reaction image character — an easy laugh for Stan Twitter regulars. At that place's a whole globe of these videos: YouTube user Dariannas Eggs is known for putting pop divas in fatal and embarrassing situations with rudimentary video-collage editing. A variation of the grade is made by TikToker @kevinatwater, who inserts himself into his popular diva audio-visual collages. These videos are the closest that filmed media has come up to replicating the pure, anarchic creativity of playing Spice Girls with Barbie dolls. They bring us back to that boundlessness. —RA

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TikTok, 2020

Graphic: @bomanizer/TikTok

Parodying the heightened production beats of reality Boob tube isn't exactly new; shows like 30 Rock and Kroll Bear witness have been doing information technology for years. But this video by TikToker Bomanizer Martinez-Reid is a classic in the realm of apprentice creators. Here, Martinez-Reid and a friend act out a relatable Gen-Z situation — not liking the caption that a friend adds to an Instagram photograph of you — and run it through the Bravo machine. The power of the edit comes in its utilize of stock sounds: Housewives music and sound effects that signify shade. Drawing on reality-TV clichés has become a superpopular TikTok tendency. One sound clip — a dramatic sound drop from the serial Bad Girls Social club — has been used over 1.5 million times on the app (and was first used by Isaiah Washington), giving ironic heft to mundane "plot twists" and confrontations. It's a style that both makes fun of how overproduced reality Television set is and demonstrates how we've all become our ain reality stars and producers — daily life, Kardashianified. —RA

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TikTok, 2020

Superhero edits on TikTok — where users requite themselves abilities similar flying or control over lightning or burn — can become their overachieving creators a lot of attending: Yous won't find a premade filter on the app that tin can generate all these objects and furnishings for yous. TikTok user @xxd222 (whose more than than 890,000 TikTok followers are nix compared to the 3.9 million she has on the app'south Chinese counterpart, Douyin) adds kung fu and superpowers to her cooking videos, as in this demonstration of how she makes the pastries called mooncakes. While most cooking videos aim to exist simple enough that viewers can replicate the results, xxd222 uses magnets to pull the moon down to Earth and flatten her dough, summons a chicken to wing overhead and drib eggs into her hands, and spins herself above the bowl when it'south fourth dimension to mix ingredients. Over-the-top sound effects and false explosions help make the concluding shot (a conventional close-up of a mooncake being split in half) a hilariously mundane payoff. Another creator on TikTok, Julian Bass — the self-proclaimed "CEO of Edits" — uses VFX to transition betwixt tricks where he turned his body semi-transparent or separated his head from his body. Last summer, he was signed by a talent agency after a TikTok in which he replicated the powers of characters similar Ben x and Spider-Man caught the eye of a Curiosity manager. To their followers, creators like xxd222 and Bass are heroes in their own correct. —JZ

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Instagram, 2020

Musicians on the cyberspace have an ear for turning anything — a video, a Reddit thread — into a song. I of the earliest was Songify the News, a spider web series responsible for the viral "Bed Intruder Vocal." More recently, TikToker Charles Cornell is known for his piano accompaniments to Cardi B's viral rants. The musician Lubalin creates songs out of absurd conversations he finds posted online. Over on Instagram, DJ iMarkkeyz (along with iComplexity and Suede the Remix God) has made an fine art out of not only transforming memes into songs, merely creating an accompanying video collage. iMarkkeyz got his starting time on Vine, when remixing videos and sounds was its ain burgeoning genre among stans, comedians, and musicians. In his at present-famous "Coronavirus," anybody from Elmo to Childish Gambino moves in sync with his remix of Cardi B maxim "Coronavirus! Shit is existent." This is editing to create a vibe, the way a DJ would at a club.

TikTok utilizes beat-sync tech, where a slideshow of photos and videos changes depending on the rhythm and frequency of a audio. Information technology'due south led to trends where y'all upload random videos and let TikTok create montages for yous (a feature that's commonly used for fan edits). Only to make something like "Coronavirus," where the music and the images are in perfect harmony, takes an editor's attention to item, aligning movement with audio so cohesively it feels no longer like a compilation. It'south also a proficient example of how an edit tin combine a multitude of cultural references and somehow make them all work. —ZH

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TikTok, 2020

"Can we finish dueting videos when we take absolutely nada to add to them?" It was a reasonable plea, posted by user @johnson_fran in November 2020 — and other users responded by duetting her original, then duetting those duets, and then on. The "Terminate dueting videos" Frankenstein chains were easily the near genius use of TikTok'due south duet characteristic, precisely because they weaponized its very purpose. They're just ane instance of the "meta edit," wherein the video knowingly subverts the viewer's expectations of what the editing might look like.

To a generation that grew upwardly watching YouTube videos made by experimental amateurs, the meta edit reveals that not only are the characters in on the joke, the tech guy behind the scenes is, too. Consider this video, in which a girl films a gag using the typical shot-reverse-shot front-facing TikTok format, then cuts to a broad shot showing what it would look like if someone walked in while she was making it. It offers a await at how embarrassing it is to perform the physical act of making a video designed to become viral on social media. Another example begins with a mundane attempt at a trending claiming, then acknowledges the emptiness of catering to digital algorithms every bit if they were ancient lord's day gods using frantic sound effects and trippy, overlapping visuals. You can offer all kinds of new editing tools on your video app — but you can be certain that people will detect a fashion to use them against you. —RJ

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TikTok, 2021

Did Tom Cruise really bring together TikTok to film himself discovering bubblegum at the heart of a lollipop and tell a story nearly meeting Mikhail Gorbachev? No — those eerily accurate videos circulating on the app in February 2021 under the username @deeptomcruise were deepfakes created by Belgian visual effects specialist Chris Ume, and were the commencement (and so far only) TikTok deepfakes to penetrate mainstream discourse. Much similar the actual Tom Cruise, they did end upward freaking out a lot of people.

Deepfakes are visual or sound content that take been manipulated past artificial intelligence to look or sound like someone else. The term was coined past a Redditor known for posting AI-generated celebrity porn in 2017. Before that year, researchers at the University of Washington terrified the world when they released a realistic-looking deepfake of Barack Obama delivering a oral communication he never gave. Since then, apps like Reface and FakeApp immune anyone with a smartphone the ability to, say, make Elon Musk sing the "Numa Numa" song or Joan Didion sing "What Is Honey" (albeit in a rather unconvincing way). Deepfakes have, of course, been used for nefarious purposes, more often than not as revenge porn. But Ume'south shows how they can besides exist a playful genre of internet art. To make his TikToks, Ume enlisted a Cruise impersonator and put in weeks of work using professional person video-editing tools and the open-source algorithm DeepFaceLab. And then many of the internet's most internet-y videos have revolved around exposing how the editing sausage gets made. Deepfakes are the reverse: an endeavor to play a trick on the brain into seeing something and to delight in the trickery. —RJ

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Twitter, 2021

Can a video encapsulate the Internet? At commencement found on Twitter, and more lately on TikTok, the meme epitomize is essentially a music video of a series of memes — sped up, slowed down, rewound, and blended together inside the entire Adobe Creative Suite. It features some of the about intriguing editing moves on the internet in 2021. Information technology's hard to pick only one, just this video set up to Charli XCX's "Unlock It (Lock It)" — a 2017 vocal that has recently gone viral on TikTok — jam packs an entire acrid trip's worth of memes into a couple minutes: the Tiny Twinz dancing over a video of Ella Emhoff's runway walk, Normani doing her "WAP" choreo encircled by the K-pop grouping Loona, drag Velma. Trying to unpack each layer of reference could fill the Library of Congress. The video, made by @twerkuwu and titled "Stan Twitter Music Video 6," is not unlike a fan edit, if the object of fixation were the Internet itself. Memes are superimposed onto others with ghostlike opacities; a greenscreen in 1 meme only means an opportunity for another overlaid on tiptop. Through their boundless rhythms, these videos approach the abstract and artistic. Watching them is like getting an IV hookup of pure internet anarchy. As Morpheus said, "No one can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself." —E. Alex Jung

Lookout man the video ➼

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