Everyone (well mostly everyone) loves taking selfies. And last week a brand new type of selfie was created. Coined by Beats by Dr. Dre, the #soloselfie requires the user to shoot a video, start at one ear, bring the camera around to their face and complete the 180 degree angle by bringing it to their other ear. That’s essentially what it is, or what it will evolve into. The trend in a new ad prominently features the popular Beats headphones and loads of celebrities doing the #soloselfie.
At the time of publishing this post, the video has just under 9,000,000 views. But it spurred a viral movement amongst many Beats users and many people in general that just want to try one.
More of an analysis is after the jump.
The #soloselfie is a natural evolution of the selfie. And is a bit of an extended evolution of some of the first video selfies that came about years ago on Vimeo when the community developed the Me Right Now. The first ones were done by some of the company’s heads. They were essentially a video portrait stating what the person is doing right now and often weren’t any longer than around 30 seconds in the beginning.
The idea of video portraits was made famous by Andy Warhol. He called them screen tests.
To add to the viral nature, the company has also put out tutorial videos on how to do a #soloselfie and have even included lots of celebrities in the video explaining the process. In the video, they tell you to shoot a video and for extra pzazz, shoot it in slow motion.
What you aren’t seeing though is the ridiculous amount of lighting that has to be on the person in order to get such a low contrast and HDR type of lighting in each video.
The trend has taken off on Instagram, Vine and Tumblr; it seems to mostly target younger thinkers, teens and young adults. The #soloselfie has even start to make the rounds in news especially because Beats is now owned by Apple.
If you really think about it, this is just the natural progression of the selfie.
