Six Seconds of Fame: An Interview With Vine Star Jessi Smiles
Jessica Vazquez, a.k.a. Jessi Smiles, rises in popularity on Vine, a video app.
Aug 14, 2013— -- There are many different ways people get famous these days. You can get mommy and daddy to pay for a really bad music video to publish on YouTube or you can do something that is super adorable and funny because you’re a baby. But not everyone is rich or still breastfeeding. So you've got to be creative and make something happen.
But if you were thinking of coming up with something clever and posting it on Twitter, you are stuck in 2009. Say hello to Vine - a growing social media monster available for download on smartphones.
Vine users, or viners, have found an enormous community of millions of people sharing videos in a raw and unedited format since you cannot just upload that “super sweet” video of some homemade lightsaber action you put together on After Effects; it’s all on the spot with your phone/device camera. Like Twitter, your posts are short and sweet (six seconds max) and hopefully you’ll gain followers beyond your grandma and that weirdo that’s liked you since 5th grade. The most popular viners have gained followers in the hundreds of thousands but a select few have reached the million mark. And even fewer have done that in four weeks time.
Meet Jessica Vazquez, Vine’s superstar princess from Miami, Fl who just recently hit her millionth follower. Posting daily as Jessi Smiles, the 20-year-old Cuban-American has used her sense of humor and charm to gain her enormous following; it also probably helps that she’s gorgeous. Along the rise, she has partnered with other big Viners, had celebrity cameos, and took followers along for the ride that was her love life.
Jessi and another super viner named Curtis Lepore began flirting through Vine and twitter with things getting serious after a few weeks. Seemingly out of an episode of MTV’s Catfish, Jessi decided to meet Curtis in person by flying to New York City while Curtis was visiting on business from L.A.
The event known as #curtisandjessimeet resulted in thousands of fans showing up at the meeting spot in Washington Square Park on Sunday, August 4th just to see these two love birds meet face-to-face for the first time. I wasn't kidding when I said it was out of an episode of Catfish, because host Nev Schuman was even there to crash the meetup.
I got a chance to talk with Jessi Smiles about her big date in the park and her sudden rise to social media fame:
Gabriel Morales: First Jessi, congrats on your million followers! How did that moment feel when you hit that 1 million?
Jessie Smiles: Oh, I freaked! (laughs) I absolutely freaked, it was such a quick climb for me, and it was a surreal moment to actually see that “1M” and then having them (Vine) verify me right after. So it was a really cool moment, a million people is a lot of people so I was really excited.
Gabriel: You do so many collaborations with big Viners, which all of you seem to do, is there some elite Vine club we don’t know about?
Jessi: Yeah, everyone wonders how we all know each other. We just found each other through Vine. Simon Rex first found me, he told me he was in Miami and wanted to collab (how cool people say collaborate) so he really got me started. We just contact each other through twitter and trade numbers. It’s so funny. I have more numbers of Viners than I do of people I don’t know through Vine. It’s really cool because Vine has such an awesome community of people.
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