68 new york | march 2–15, 2020
at snapchat’sNew York offices
this winter, members of the creative
team behind the popular reality se-
riesEndlesswere feeling the limitations of
mobile storytelling. The episode they had
gathered to edit included a big set piece: Star
Summer McKeen and her friend Jessica
Matis walk through Times Square without
realizing that McKeen’s ex-boyfriend, Dylan
Jordan, is there at the same time. As
McKeen disappears into the crowd, there is
aSliding Doorsmoment; behind her, Jor-
dan appears on a billboard-size screen,
filmed by a camera that captures footage of
tourists. On a reality show made for TV, this
is where you would cut to a wide shot, mea-
suring the distance between the two exes.
But on one made for a phone-size screen, it
didn’t quite ... fit.
The team knew this posed narrative prob-
lems. How close were McKeen and Jordan
supposed to be? Had she seen him, or hadn’t
she? “There’s no time for slow builds on
mobile,” Snapchat head of content Sean
Mills, explained later. He mimicked pan-
ning a camera around the room. “You’ll lose
people righthere.” His hands stopped long
before the camera would have come to focus
on our conversation.
For months now, a mobile-storytelling
platform called Quibi has loomed on the
content horizon, promising that, when its
app launches this spring, it will be a home to
a huge library of short-form shows made
specifically for your phone. But Snapchat
has been operating in that space for years.
According to its numbers, 218 million peo-
ple use the app daily. With over 38 million
viewers,Endless(previously calledEndless
Summer), created by Michelle Peerali and
Andrea Metz, is the most watched of the 95
original shows that have appeared on the
platform in the past few years. It’s now in its
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third season, and most of its audience is
between 13 and 24 years old (by Snapchat’s
statistics, 90 percent of people in the U.S. in
that age range have the app on their phones).
The company 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.
It’s tempting to define Snap Originals by
comparing them with more familiar for-
mats, but they’re not TV and they’re not
movies chopped up into little pieces. They’re
not YouTube videos, either, or half-baked
snippets of other content spliced for Face-
book. None of those mediums or platforms
have radically rethought how mobile stories
could work in the way Snapchat has. You-
Tube videos, for instance, can be of any
length, and they’re made for a standard
horizontal frame; Snap shows are designed
for a vertical one, and they play without ask-
ing viewers to flip their phones sideways.
This may seem minor, but in practice it has
been an enormous shift, requiring the com-
pany to completely reconsider the directing
and editing process. Since film was invented,
vertical framing has been seen as incongru-
ous with cinematic storytelling. For Snap-
chat, it means new camera rigs, scene transi-
tions, carefully calibrated blocking, and a
visual aesthetic designed expressly to fit its
digital platform. It’s a level of challenge that
could make the platform’s creative partners
throw up their hands in frustration. But it’s
also exactly the type of constraint that can
lead to remarkable innovation.
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 dis-tances, a Snap Original is a moped, fun and
fast, carrying little but zipping through traf-
fic. Mills spoke about his mission as if it’s
both world changing and painfully obvious.
Of course, mobile content deserves to be
considered with care and attention. Of
course, something made for a phone should
be designed to play on a phone. “This oppor-
tunity doesn’t come around often for a
medium to tell stories in a new way,” Mills
said. “As much as that stuff can be a conve-
nient talking point, for us, it’s religion.”there are hallmarks to a Snapchat
show. Episodes run five minutes on average
and ideally no longer than eight. While your
typical half-hour sitcom needs to grab a
viewer’s attention in the first three minutes,
on Snapchat, the goal is closer to three sec-
onds. A show might tell a story with several
characters—in the case of Endless, McKeen
and Jordan are joined by a small constella-
tion of friends and love interests—but a
single scene rarely shows more than two or
three. Vertical frames don’t have room for
two faces unless the subjects are sitting un-
naturally close to each other. To get around
this, they rely heavily on split screens.
Shows are structured so that one scene
tumbles into the next without a break, but
they are not defined by speed. Characters
don’t speak unusually fast, and plots don’t
move at a breakneck pace. They are distin-
guished by a feeling of density that has more
to do with what’s missing: Every bit of still-
ness has been excised to optimize how much
gets packed into each episode. In some ways,
this is the same as any TV series or movie—
all storytelling involves cutting out parts that
don’t pull their weight. But in a three-hour
extravaganza ofThe Bachelor,or the C-plot
of any sitcom, there’s space for fillerEndless
could never afford. Silly faces, talking-head-
style interviews in which the subject trails off
in the middle of an idea—you don’t realize
how fundamental that stuff is to the experi-
ence of watching TV until it’s suddenly gone.
These features are in every Snap Original
across genres. There’s the zombie drama
Dead of NightandCoEd,a show about high-
school friends going to different colleges.
Dead Girls Detective Agencyis a YA adapta-
tion about, yes, four dead girls who team up
to solve a murder. All these shows move with
the same heightened efficiency.
Operating creatively from a place of scar-
city also demands a particular aesthetic. The
“Snap product is a lot about stimulating the
visual,” said Julie Pizzi, the president of en-
tertainment and development forBunim/
Murray Productions, the company behind
Endlessand other genre-defining reality
shows likeKeeping Up With the Kardashi-
ansandThe Real World.She compared it toWhat ComesAfter TV?Snapchat is making hypercondensed
shows specifically to watch on
a smartphone. It’s harder than you’d think.
By Kathryn VanArendonkPHOTOGRAPH BY: JENS KALAENE/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES (PHONE)Photograph by Cara Robbins