With Hol­ly­wood at a stand­still, young film­mak­ers turn to TikTok

It is sun­rise and Vic­to­ria Misu, 26, is wear­ing a light blue dress, cinched at the waist with a bronze belt, lying in front of five mir­rors. Light pours in through a blush cur­tain. She lifts her left hand, traces her col­lar­bone and picks up a glass filled with flower petals. She then leans back and lets you see her, briefly, as a per­fect paint­ing before the Tik­Tok begins again.

The whole clip – staged, com­posed, colour-cor­rect­ed – lasts 15 sec­onds. It’s been viewed on the app by 1.3 mil­lion people.

Misu is one of the many film­mak­ers that have joined Tik­Tok in order to find an audi­ence for their work. With over two bil­lions down­loads and count­ing, the video-shar­ing plat­form has tak­en the world by storm and is addic­tive by design. Videos can­not exceed 60 sec­onds and are usu­al­ly much short­er. In the ear­ly days, Tik­Tok con­tent pri­mar­i­ly con­sist­ed of trendy, easy-to-learn dances, often appeal­ing to a younger crowd (report­ed­ly 41 per cent of users are between 16 and 24). As Made­laine Turn­er, a 28-year-old Tik­Tok film­mak­er, puts it, ​“I’m an old lady. I shouldn’t be on this app!”

But Tik­Toks have evolved way beyond lip-synced dance rou­tines. Now that cre­ators are being signed by big-name agen­cies like William Mor­ris Endeav­or and Unit­ed Tal­ent Agency, the plat­form has emerged as a viable path to Hol­ly­wood. The pos­si­bil­i­ties for film­mak­ers are end­less – assum­ing they can adapt their con­tent to the app’s unique for­mat and per­haps have a lit­tle luck.

Misu has already reaped the rewards of her viral video. She saw an influx of fol­low­ers (she now has over 100,000) fol­lowed by tan­gi­ble oppor­tu­ni­ties. Record labels, she says, have reached out for her to col­lab­o­rate with their artists and sev­er­al com­pa­nies have asked to license her videos. Turn­er has had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. When she made a par­o­dy of Wes Anderson’s films, it blew up far beyond her then-small pool of fol­low­ers. The video got over a mil­lion views, and Turn­er was sud­den­ly get­ting phone calls from indus­try professionals.

“It feels like in some way almost every­one should be big on Tik­Tok,” Turn­er says. ​“The nature of Tik­Tok is that you sort of find your niche of peo­ple who want to watch your stuff.” The ​“nature” she’s refer­ring to is the mys­te­ri­ous ​‘For You’ page. While most social media plat­forms pri­ori­tise show­ing users con­tent from cre­ators they fol­low, many Tik­Tok users spend much of their time scrolling through their ​‘For You’ page – a stream of videos curat­ed for them by TikTok.

Many have tried to crack the ​‘For You’ algo­rithm with min­i­mal suc­cess, but the gist is that Tik­Tok first shows a video to sub­groups that will be most like­ly to engage with it; the more engage­ment with­in that sub­group, the more peo­ple the app shows the video, regard­less of how many actu­al fol­low­ers the cre­ator has. If that sounds com­plete­ly ran­dom to you, you’re not alone. One film­mak­er, Con­nor Land­hauser, 23, laments, ​“Some things blow up for no rea­son and then oth­er things that peo­ple put a lot of effort into don’t get as many views.”

But that ran­dom­ness can act as an equalis­er. ​“It gives peo­ple a lot of space to get in with­out hav­ing to make these super high-bud­get films,” Misu says. Even if you’re just get­ting start­ed, the app will essen­tial­ly curate an audi­ence for you.

Of course, mak­ing 15-sec­ond videos is decep­tive­ly chal­leng­ing and often requires film­mak­ers to rethink their usu­al tech­niques. ​“If you can’t nail someone’s atten­tion in the first five sec­onds,” Land­hauser says. ​“They’re gonna scroll past and you’re not going to get that back.”

Land­hauser adapts his usu­al nar­ra­tive style by upping the tem­po, with quick cuts and mul­ti­ple loca­tions. Turn­er says the app forces her to ​“trim the fat as a film­mak­er” and crit­i­cal­ly assess every second.

For Rhe­gan Coursey, 17, that meant adopt­ing an entire­ly new style. After years of mak­ing YouTube videos with­out find­ing an audi­ence, she sud­den­ly gained about two mil­lion fol­low­ers in three months. All it took was mak­ing her head dis­ap­pear. Coursey is known for her ​“tran­si­tion” videos, where she uses quick cuts and clever cam­era place­ment to cre­ate opti­cal illusions.

In a sin­gle video, she twists her sweat­shirt to ​“rip” off her head, puts it back on, mul­ti­plies so there’s ten of her, and then ​“rips” her head off one more time for good mea­sure. She reveals it can take up to an hour to make one 15-sec­ond clip.

The app pro­vides an ever-expand­ing selec­tion of fil­ters and sound­tracks, while cre­ators them­selves are con­stant­ly invent­ing new trends and styles. Rather than feel­ing lim­it­ed by the app, Turn­er says she feels like ​“a kid in the can­dy shop.”

Some film­mak­ers, how­ev­er, do feel con­strained by the plat­form. Most of the big-name Tik­Tok­ers – the Hype House, the Sway Boys – have already expand­ed to YouTube where they can make con­tent with­out wor­ry­ing about length. Many film­mak­ers sim­i­lar­ly have their eyes set on big­ger projects.

Land­hauser wants to become a pro­fes­sion­al cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er and sees Tik­Tok as a cru­cial step­ping stone. Once he gained a fol­low­ing, he reached out to oth­er cre­ators to col­lab­o­rate. He now plans on shoot­ing a pilot this sum­mer with Jake Karamol, a tat­too artist Tik­Tok­er with 900,000 fol­low­ers, to pitch to stream­ing ser­vices in the fall. Although Land­hauser received a tra­di­tion­al film edu­ca­tion at the School of Visu­al Arts in New York City, he quick­ly realised that the indus­try was chang­ing. ​“Since grad­u­at­ing,” he says, ​“social media plays a big role in mak­ing mon­ey or mak­ing those con­nec­tions to get those jobs.”

Land­hauser hopes to one day make it to Hol­ly­wood, but for now he plans to keep grow­ing his fol­low­ing on Tik­Tok. ​“Love it or hate it, num­bers can help you.”