TikTok & Video Design Loops
Arful Design Chapter 3
I am responding to Ge Wang's Artful Design, Chapter 3,
and the idea of design loops. The most common medium of design loops today
is in video-based social media. From Vine to Instagram reels and TikTok,
automatically looping videos have slowly spread across the internet. In terms
of design choices, everyone on TikTok knows their videos will loop, but
only sometimes does that feature directly shape the content itself. In what
I've encountered, there seem to be three major categories of overt looping
on TikTok: the rhetorical, the crowdsourced, and the trippy.
The first very much takes after the Song That Never Ends, using
the video's verbal content to tie together the loop rather than the visuals.
For baking and other tutorial videos, this type of overt looping works well
with the general format of displaying a preview of the final product before
going through the process from start to finish. Conceptually, this is the
simplest design of the three, but I personally have yet to see it executed
flawlessly; below is a fairly good example, from the creator
@chelsweets. Although
semantically a perfect circle, the different cadences of the start and end
speech somewhat break the illusion of infinity.
The second category capitalizes on TikTok's duet feature,
which allows users to directly add onto someone else's creation. While many
are just one back-and-forth, some duets grow into chains well beyond (what I
assume was) the feature's intended use case. It reminds me of the Infinite
Cat Project mentioned in Artful Design, a celebration of just how many
people are online and how absurd group participation can become in that
context. Below is one of the most popular duet chains, rooted in a video
criticizing making duets when one has "absolutely nothing to add." Even when
they don't have delighfully self-referential audio, these kinds of chains are
designed with an awareness of their medium: each video latches onto the edge
of a previous one, simultaneously completing the scene further and implying
an infinite universe within the video.
The third category is where creators can really go wild playing
with perspective to create seamless audio and graphics loops. In the example
below, the animator @supertrip64
uses these extreme shifts in point of view to create a loop within a loop.
As a viewer on TikTok looks at their phone screen, the first-person
perspective within the video is focused on their computer screen. When the
world within the computer screen engulfs the entire video, it gives the
impression that there are infinite worlds contained within that one computer,
let alone in the rest of the video universe or the entirety of the internet.