It’s impossible to not stumble across #corecore or #nichetok videos on TikTok these days.
They have gained popularity within the past month or so, but for those who are unfamiliar, I’ll do my best to try to explain. They are edited compilations of cathartic video snippets, often existential or despondent in nature, and leave you with a feeling of melancholy. I’m not sure that description really does it justice, so here are two examples:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRgYue59/
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRgY6EXK/
I love this new style of video editing because it gets straight to the point, prioritizing emotion over flashy effects or smooth transitions. It’s amazing to me that we’ve figured out a way to condense emotions down into 60 second edited videos.
It used to be that you had to sit through a two hour movie with character development and an ebb and flow of tension and release before you got to the payoff of some sort of emotional response. Maybe a relationship ends in heartbreak or a dog dies and all of a sudden you find yourself reaching for the box of tissues. The kissing scene at the end of Cinema Paradiso comes to mind for me when I think about emotional endings. But you need the context of the full movie in order for that scene to have any meaning or cause any emotional response. Out of context, it doesn’t have the same effect.
But with #corecore, we’ve figured out a way to distill that emotional catharsis down to a short burst. Someone somewhere said: let’s just take a bunch of emotional clips, put them all together one after another, throw some moody music over top of it, and voila, a new genre is born.
It makes me think a lot about how the medium is the message. Social media has forced us to find new ways to draw out the same emotions from viewers. Because everything on TikTok is compressed into a 15 to 60 second experience, creators use brevity to their advantage. It does not matter how the video is edited but rather that it conjures the correct emotions.
People want to feel something from the art they consume. Whether they’re watching a cute cat video or a military homecoming, they want to be rewarded emotionally. It does make me wonder how things will continue to change with time. If things have already gotten this punchy and quick in the last 20 years of the internet, what will entertainment look like 20 years from now?
People still go to the movies, people still watch TV, people still read books, but now there’s this new thing—people watch #corecore videos and let out a wistful sigh before scrolling onto the next video, which by the way, is probably a video that elicits an entirely different emotional response (like a video of girlfriends pranking their boyfriends into showing up to a party wearing the same shirt).
If our minds are able to jump from sad to happy to funny to angry to scared all in the span of 5 minutes or less, what will we expect out of content in the future? Will the pendulum swing back the other way? Will we crave longer, deeper forms of meaning in our art? Or will the reduction of our attention span continue to accelerate to the point where we become bored with even a 30 minute television show?
I have no clue what the future holds; the mediums and genres of film, video, and television are being blurred. But there are two constants that will always be true: people want to feel emotions, and people will always create and consume art.
Only time will tell what form that takes.
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It’s impossible to not stumble across #corecore or #nichetok videos on TikTok these days.
They have gained popularity within the past month or so, but for those who are unfamiliar, I’ll do my best to try to explain. They are edited compilations of cathartic video snippets, often existential or despondent in nature, and leave you with a feeling of melancholy. I’m not sure that description really does it justice, so here are two examples:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRgYue59/
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRgY6EXK/
I love this new style of video editing because it gets straight to the point, prioritizing emotion over flashy effects or smooth transitions. It’s amazing to me that we’ve figured out a way to condense emotions down into 60 second edited videos.
It used to be that you had to sit through a two hour movie with character development and an ebb and flow of tension and release before you got to the payoff of some sort of emotional response. Maybe a relationship ends in heartbreak or a dog dies and all of a sudden you find yourself reaching for the box of tissues. The kissing scene at the end of Cinema Paradiso comes to mind for me when I think about emotional endings. But you need the context of the full movie in order for that scene to have any meaning or cause any emotional response. Out of context, it doesn’t have the same effect.
But with #corecore, we’ve figured out a way to distill that emotional catharsis down to a short burst. Someone somewhere said: let’s just take a bunch of emotional clips, put them all together one after another, throw some moody music over top of it, and voila, a new genre is born.
It makes me think a lot about how the medium is the message. Social media has forced us to find new ways to draw out the same emotions from viewers. Because everything on TikTok is compressed into a 15 to 60 second experience, creators use brevity to their advantage. It does not matter how the video is edited but rather that it conjures the correct emotions.
People want to feel something from the art they consume. Whether they’re watching a cute cat video or a military homecoming, they want to be rewarded emotionally. It does make me wonder how things will continue to change with time. If things have already gotten this punchy and quick in the last 20 years of the internet, what will entertainment look like 20 years from now?
People still go to the movies, people still watch TV, people still read books, but now there’s this new thing—people watch #corecore videos and let out a wistful sigh before scrolling onto the next video, which by the way, is probably a video that elicits an entirely different emotional response (like a video of girlfriends pranking their boyfriends into showing up to a party wearing the same shirt).
If our minds are able to jump from sad to happy to funny to angry to scared all in the span of 5 minutes or less, what will we expect out of content in the future? Will the pendulum swing back the other way? Will we crave longer, deeper forms of meaning in our art? Or will the reduction of our attention span continue to accelerate to the point where we become bored with even a 30 minute television show?
I have no clue what the future holds; the mediums and genres of film, video, and television are being blurred. But there are two constants that will always be true: people want to feel emotions, and people will always create and consume art.
Only time will tell what form that takes.
