Photo by Guido Fuà on Unsplash
I discovered TikTok about a year ago. I was aware of it before then, but I started participating in late May 2023. It’s been a year and I need to decide if it is worth my time as a creator. I love making memes, and the BookQuotes I do there (under @erinpennbooks) are really fun trying to find a balance between the book cover, a quote and its font, the music, and a special effect. But it does take time, to find the quotes, create the posts, and participate in the community.
As I well know, any thing I do is time away from other things, like writing. So is TikTok really worth it?
One of the cool things I have been able to do, not much, but I want to do more, is Lip-Sync Acting – taking words from somewhere else and put my own personal spin on them. I created a few skits for this (see the below YouTube link, where I transferred them over).
Anyway, the cool blog talks about acting out a scene using someone else’s words, explaining how it is legitimate. Having watched the performers grow over time only confirms the bloggers comments for me.
And the concept of “defamiliarization” where the original performance is completely changed in the new presentation, creating a new meaning, is exactly what acting is all about. I especially adore when creators add things like “POV: Writer at their desk” – and the original sound bite of someone spiraling into madness from a horror movie is meshed with the person typing and “talking” to themselves. Watching someone taking words from the Friends sitcom and applying it to a bard hitting on a barbarian warrior on the RPG-side of TikTok can make me laugh aloud.
See “In Defense of Lip-Sync Acting” by Morgan Pryor. Published on Medium on October 4, 2021. https://nyulocal.com/in-defense-of-lip-sync-acting-42b45226e9e4
Here is one of my Enabler skits where I did Lip-Sync Acting (you can find more on my YouTube channel (Erin Penn)) where I defamiliarized by creating a different story using the same exact words:
And here is a skit where I jumped off from the original words, but printed my own on the screen. “To be fair, I was in a bookstore unsupervised”
A couple times I’ve even gone as far as duet … I haven’t transferred all of them from my TikTok. If you would like to see more, be sure to follow me on YouTube and TikTok. And comment below about anything on my TikTok which catches your eye. Let me know what, or even if, I should continue to create on this playground.