If They Don’t Go Extreme, No One Will Watch Their Video

People are duct-taping phones to their cars, jogging backward on a beach for hours, and running circles around their friends. The aim is to capture the perfect video for TikTok. 

Nice lighting and filters simply don’t cut it on TikTok like they did on the “gram”—Instagram, that is. In today’s fast-paced, short-form video world, social-media influencers and regular people have to record clips set to popular songs and film in jaw-dropping locales to get attention. They often task their family and friends to help and film take after take to get the perfect video. 

The purpose of these shoots is varied. Some do it to be seen by friends and family. For others, it is the core of their business. Getting attention for the craziest video—or even the blooper that occurs during filming—can make the difference between creating a successful business and not. (Some people get hurt taking selfies or videos, but none of the people in this report were injured.)

Camryn Cobb, an aerospace engineering student at Texas A&M University in College Station, started filming videos with her sister, Cassidy, during the pandemic. Now the 19-year-old and 15-year-old siblings make videos whenever Camryn is home from college, including in July when they visited Galveston, Texas. 

The duo planned to participate in a TikTok trend involving Amazon’s show “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and Taylor Swift’s song “August,” where people run along the beach while singing along to the music. They brought several summer dresses to the beach and asked some friends to record behind-the-scenes videos.

What they didn’t anticipate was how difficult it would be to nail the TikTok trend. The Cobb sisters needed to yell the song lyrics to be heard over the sound of the ocean. They couldn’t capture video fast enough so they had to enlist another friend to help them. And the many takes meant they soon were drenched by the waves. 

At one point, the elder Cobb sister went into the water and got hit by a wave. Instead of drying off, she decided to keep lip syncing and splashing around in the water—while still wearing her dress.

The footage was worth it, though, as the video looked more emotional than planned. They gave up after filming for about 30 minutes and recording nearly a dozen potential TikToks. 

“I’m pretty sure my car still smells like the ocean,” the elder Cobb sister said.

One roll at a time

Anna May Zeng is a 23-year-old content creator who regularly posts TikToks about her life. Zeng normally doesn’t create videos centered on viral songs or dances but decided to try one in February after a sped-up version of “Ceilings” by Lizzy McAlpine went viral. That video trend typically involves someone lip syncing while running in a showstopper outfit, such as a wedding dress or ball gown. 

Zeng’s attempt required a flowy blue dress, duct tape and a patient family. 

She used the durable tape to secure her iPhone 11 to the back of her car while her brother drove it slowly around a parking lot. Her first shoot, at night, left her with a shadow in her video. 

She tried again two days later. After about eight takes, Zeng got what she wanted: a video with the right pacing, a sunset reflected on the glass building behind her and, most important, a phone that stayed duct-taped to the car. 

“It was the only idea we had that could possibly work,” Zeng said of the tape, which she had used before without issues on her car’s exterior. 

Her original video received more than four million views, while the sunset one has more than 20 million views. Since the initial TikToks proved so popular, Zeng decided to make one more version in the rain. Her duct tape didn’t hold that time, but her phone survived unscathed. That video got 80,000 views. 

Do-it-yourself schemes

When Emily Chen

She was nearly done recording when more people came to the rooftop. Chen asked them to film her as she filmed her friends. They agreed. 

“It was so funny because it was just three people running around the girls—it was me, a guy behind me and a guy behind him,” Chen says. “The strangers who were recording it, they were dying. It just made for a good time.” The video has 4,000 views on TikTok.  

In the public eye

When it came to the Cobb sisters in Texas, they soon found out that their friends weren’t the only people documenting their efforts.

Sydnee Stovall, a 23-year-old doctorate student of occupational therapy at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, has lived a five-minute walk from the beach for about a year. She has witnessed numerous people filming and taking photographs of themselves for hours, without realizing what they look like to others. 

On the July day the Cobb sisters visited the beach, Stovall decided to film them to prove to her brother that people spend big chunks of time shooting videos on the beach. Stovall posted the video on TikTok and got more than 226,000 views for the blooper. The videos from the sisters, meanwhile, got about 13,000 views for one and 12,000 for the other. 

The Cobbs didn’t know they accidentally went viral until a friend alerted them. “I had no clue that she was there at all,” the younger Cobb sister says of Stovall. 

Stovall, meanwhile, is sure she’ll keep seeing people making TikToks. 

“Everyone thinks that their little section of the beach, no one can pay attention to them,” Stovall says. “The locals—we are watching everything.”

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Write to Ann-Marie Alcántara at [email protected]