Snapchat has studied what works on a phone and what does not, and from those lessons, it has invented mobile storytelling as a new art form. kvanaren reports on the company's hypercondensed shows
Endless stars Summer McKeen and Dylan Jordan. Photo: Cara Robbins and Jen Kalanen/Picture Alliance via Getty Images At Snapchat’s New York offices this winter, members of the creative team behind the popular reality series Endless were feeling the limitations of mobile storytelling.
It isn’t the only major obstacle, either. Snap Originals must be hypercondensed, each episode edited down to a few minutes of ultralean narrative machinery. If a movie is a mansion, a Snap Original is a Pinterest-worthy tiny house. If TV is a semi-truck, capacious and capable of traveling long distances, a Snap Original is a moped, fun and fast, carrying little but zipping through traffic. Mills spoke about his mission as if it’s both world changing and painfully obvious.
Operating creatively from a place of scarcity also demands a particular aesthetic. The “Snap product is a lot about stimulating the visual,” said Julie Pizzi, the president of entertainment and development for Bunim/Murray Productions, the company behind Endless and other genre-defining reality shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians and The Real World. She compared it to a video of many colors of paint swirling together or a body leaping into a pool full of foam.
Snap Originals ask to be watched in a way that reminds me most of spending time on social-media apps: endlessly refreshing, moving rapidly from one platform to the next. “A scene isn’t necessarily moving fast,” Endless producer Dave Henry explained, “but for you to be able to do some active work with your eyes, it gives the perception that things are moving a little quicker.”
Then there are the ads. A five-minute episode can’t support lengthy interstitials, so Snapchat supplies brief, unskippable commercials. They arrive abruptly in the middle of a story, last for five to ten seconds, and disappear. Take the docuseries While Black, with MK Asante, which examines the experience of blackness in America. The first episode is a conversation with a man whose family was racially profiled by a store manager and police. “These are not isolated incidents,” Asante explains.
Snapchat is hoping that, as its profile grows, more storytellers will be curious to play in the box the company has created. Their curiosity may be sparked by other platforms, however. Even before its release, Quibi has used an immense marketing budget and high-profile names to produce the kind of buzz Snap Originals has never had. Mills hopes that, rather than being a zero-sum game, Quibi will make all mobile shows more visible, Snapchat’s included.
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