NEW YORK—As a celebrity viner, Meagan Cignoli creates six-second commercials for brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Swarovski, and Comedy Central. But when she was approached by her first client less than a year ago, her initial thought was that she couldn’t possible be ready to do this.
Doubts flooded her mind. Cignoli was a photographer and filmmaker. She had had a Vine account for only three weeks. Vine, a 10-month old app owned by Twitter, is a social media marketing platform where users share six-second looping videos.
“I thought ‘I’m not going to do this, I don’t know enough about it,’” she said. But as Cignoli, 32, looked back on the events of her life, it seemed that she had always gained the most when she took the courage to step into the unknown.
And Vine was something that was rather unknown at the time.
Most vines are humorous, but Cignoli is setting the precedent for artistic, philosophical vines. She would create vines such as a loop of a girl whose tears grow flowers, followed by a quote from Brian Jacques: “Don’t be ashamed to weep. Tears are only water and flowers cannot grow without water.”
Vine turned out to be the perfect career for Cignoli. She used to make films that focused on the aesthetics of a scene rather than dialogue. Just prior to the advent of Vine, she had experienced a plateau in her artistic career and inspiration.
At the time, she had considered leaving art behind to become a personal trainer.
“Sometimes when you get into something for a few years, it’s important to take some time off and get away from it,” she said. “You need to get back to the origins of your creativity.”
So Cignoli set off to travel in Europe for a few months alone. She went to a different museum every day, in cities such as Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. “It was strange, I’ve never done anything like that before,” she said. “I was so taken by other people’s work that I got out of my own.”
When she returned from Europe, she became addicted to Vine.
“Everyone was saying, you’re spending way too much time on this,” she joked. But then it turned into a full-time job.
A Day in the Life of a Professional Viner
Cignoli has nearly 400,000 followers on Vine, and that can come in handy.
She asks her followers for advice on things such as fashion and equipment. “You get some really interesting answers,” she said.
Her phone rings off the hook from advertising companies and corporations.
“I worked so much of my life without recognition, so it is nice to be recognized,” she said
Yet one of the things she has always valued in life is solitude.
To create alone time in a work-dominated life, Cignoli takes long, silent walks at night. One of her favorite places to walk is by South Ferry in Manhattan, at a time when there is no other soul in sight.
“I love to sing to the world then, when the waves are so loud that no one can hear me,” she said.
For a private person, she is often in the public. But there are ways to deal with that.
Cignoli usually doesn’t appear in her vines—but when she does, she wears a wig.
Her real hair is short and without bangs. “I like dressing up, it adds to a layer that helps keep yourself private,” she said.
Cignoli finds inspiration for vines every two blocks: a street, an alley, a doorway. She thinks of everything as photograph before she begins the vine.
Most of Cignoli’s vines are created through stop motion, an animation technique that manipulates the shots to make it appear as if an object is moving on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, which creates the illusion of movement.
Cignoli spent 14 hours on her stop motion vine for Ebay Now, but it was nowhere near the longest time she spent on a vine. She recently created a vine, with three people, that took two-and-a-half weeks.
“I have a lot of fun with it,” she said.
Life Before Vine
Cignoli grew up in a small town on in Suffolk County, Long Island.
Her whole family was artistic and nurturing. Her mother volunteered at a greenhouse charity that taught the mentally challenged how to garden.
Cignoli knew at age four that she wanted to make art. She was sketching fashion designs by the time she was in the fifth grade.
“Growing up, I had a big room filled with buttons, fabric, everything I needed to create,” she said.
It was a nurturing environment, but she felt that she needed to leave in order to gain exposure to the world.
“It was a sheltered area. I didn’t always feel like I belonged there,” she recalled. “I didn’t know what sushi was, and I lived a half hour away from Manhattan.”
So after she turned 18, Cignoli set off to travel by herself to places such as India and Thailand.
“Family is important and money is important, those are things you can’t walk away from,” she said. “But sometimes you need to take the time to go off, even when people tell you you can’t do certain things.”
Cignoli spent a year in Cuba about eight years ago. She studied Spanish at a Cuban university.
At the time, Cignoli wanted to be a travel photographer. She made friends with an older photographer woman who gave her private lessons. They still write to one another every month.
It was not an easy environment, but because of that, people were very close to one another.
“Now I’m more interested in politics, and things that I used to feel didn’t apply to me,” she said.
“In Thailand I became more aware of health and well-being. In India I became very creative,” she said. “In Cuba I became more of an adult.”
“It’s important to go out and learn about other cultures,” she said. “I’ve had some powerful experiences in these places that have changed me.”
