This wordless 2015 Vine by the creator who now posts under was one of the first to become popular: Dancing to a-ha’s “Take on Me,” she whips her face around to reveal a mouth full of braces and an inscrutable smile.
The camera moves in and establishes, or otherwise breaks, the fourth wall - similar to the cinematography of mockumentaries like The Office. It can be used to subvert expectations and emphasize a reaction. The extreme zoom is one of the easiest and most effective editing tricks and a fixture across content platforms. Graphic: you just need a little emphasis. The “Countdown” Snuggie would have worked perfectly, nearly a decade later. And then, of course, there’s the Snuggie Do-Nguyen wears throughout: One TikTok trend last year involved recreating album covers using household items. There’s a shot panning across a half-dozen vertical frames of Do-Nguyen dancing that looks like it could have 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). The bulk of the video is shot in landscape, but Do-Nguyen integrates vertical shots throughout the video - particularly innovative in a time when many hadn’t accepted that the typical way people hold their phones is the easiest way to film with one. A masterpiece made by and starring then-16-year-old Ton Do-Nguyen, it combines his flawless lip-sync performance with key editing elements we still see over and over in modern viral content, achieved with a digital camera and the editing program Vegas. But this particular one, a shot-for-shot recreation of Beyoncé’s “Countdown” video, was made before all that. Lip-syncing is everywhere now, 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. 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 attempt it, or just pulled off a jaw-dropping editing feat all their own. Every once in a while, though, there’s a leap forward. Online video is an inherently communal form it’s defined by thousands of people iterating on the same idea. That’s only accelerated in the age of TikTok, an app that offers more and easier editing tools for users than any that came before it. Suddenly, anybody could shoot and edit a video, building the vocabulary of what that could look like: transition videos, lip syncs, and green-screen-driven storytelling began to cohere as distinct subgenres. The online video has, of course, existed for decades, but it was the smartphone - and the proliferation of apps to come out of it - that made editing more sophisticated and more accessible to creators than it had ever been. 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. Like any art form, this one has been shaped in part by the technology available at the time. And yet, the internet video has long lacked definition as a discrete genre, with its own tropes, techniques, and history.
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