Vine is a pretty amazing platform, but its youth still shows: though plenty of filmmakers, comedians, and various other content-creators are populating the social network with great six-second clips, its unrefined exploratory tools can make finding the good stuff difficult.
That’s where ANIMAL comes in. We’ve spent a lot of time with Vine, and along the way, we’ve found users making challenging, beautiful, and LOL-worthy work. Here are a few of our favorites.
Note: Because Vine doesn’t offer web profiles (yet), there’s no way to link to users. For now, we’re including user names, which are searchable within the app.
Pinot: Indonesian designer Pinot is Vine’s best animator, often mixing real, three-dimensional objects in with his pencil drawings. Dita uploads the odd video of his kids alongside his masterful stop-motion works, but they’re adorable enough to merit a follow anyway.
Mike Immerman & Allison Bagg: ANIMAL’s pigeon editors are the Coen Brothers of Vine. Mixing slapstick comedy with the surreal stop-motion that’s becoming a hallmark of the medium, Mike and Allison create videos that marry charm to technical sophistication. The pair posts videos to each of their Vine accounts, @abagg and @doxin3.
Casey Neistat: Casey Neistat, NYC’s best YouTube documentarian, also makes crazy stop-motion animations, often involving his favorite mode of transportation. Here’s one.
Will Sasso: Using his adorable Italian mother, the impersonations he’s been honing for years, and lots of lemons, the former MADtv cast member has already earned a reputation as Vine’s funniest filmmaker.
Yell Design: Follow Yell Design if you enjoy food, stop-motion animation, or stop-motion animation of food. Here are some zany bananas behaving like dolphins.
Man Bartlett: Artist Man Bartlett uses collage and a sine wave generator to make his meditative vignettes, one of which was a highlight submission of ANIMAL’s recent Vine film festival.
Keelayjams: Probably my favorite person on Vine. Keelayjams takes weird Twitter’s fondness for the non-sequitur and makes it visual, as sad black metal kids eat pizza, liquor comes out of Sarah Jessica Parker’s eyes, and a fistful of hotdogs gets thrown at a ceiling fan. Below, Lana Del Rey fails at video games.
Adam Goldberg: The OG of artful Vine-ing, Goldberg creates hazy, dreamlike montages. This Verge profile says much more about the actor/filmmaker than we could fit here.
Tyra Banks: Not trolling. Banks’s famously unhinged personality is on full display here; watch as the former screams, runs around, and giddily applies makeup. She’s really funny!
James Urbaniak: Mixed in with weird meta-Vines directed at Sasso, Goldberg, and Steve Agee are miniature sketches like this one, in which a happily domesticated David Bowie wanders around the house.
Jake Lodwick: Silicon Valley lightning rod Jake Lodwick is one of the weirdest multi-millionaires around: he created Vimeo, and has been a part of properties as disparate as CollegeHumor, Muxtape (RIP), and MakerBot. The is a guy who made a web app inspired by a mushroom trip. That strangeness shines through in his offbeat Vine-ing.
Fartpalace: Twitter comedian, designer, and animator Lacey Micallef aka @fartpalace makes Vines in which weird stuff comes out of her mouth. Like this one.
Dogboner: Another weird Twitter-er, @dogboner is perhaps Vine’s greatest troll, broadcasting the entirety of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Masterin six-second chunks. He’s on part 6 of 1370 now. Stay tuned!
Fred Durst: Okay, now I’m just trolling. But if you truly aren’t interested in seeing these tiny windows into the 43-year-old father of one’s life, I don’t think I want to know you.
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