Documenting Our Year with a Video

After hearing about Elise Cripe’s journey using the 1 Second Everday app on her iPhone, I bit the bullet the first week into January and downloaded it. I’m terrible at 1. taking videos and 2. doing anything with them. It’s a shame. The girls are growing so fast and I have bitty 10 second snippets of randomness all over my phone with a hope and a prayer that one day it will turn into something. But there’s no thought behind it or cohesiveness or story being told anywhere.

What’s neat about video though? It’s honest, authentic, real life, inspiring.

The purpose behind Cesar Kuriyama’s app is to capture just one single second of each and every day of the year resulting in a 6 ish minute video mash of awesome.

There is a second option for the app and it’s more freestyle (ps I heard that this version might not stay forever – but I hope it does! – so if this is more ‘you’, you might try downloading it sooner rather than later). Rather than a 1 second per day restriction, the freeform option allows you to skip days, pull in more than 1 second of action per day (but still in 1 second splices), and in general offers less stress and more options. Above is our mini family video for the first 5 weeks of this year. You can tell by the dates that I skip days that I forget and that I tack on more 1 second snippets for days that I don’t ever want to forget. I’m definitely enjoying the freestyle version of this app.

You guys, this is so good. I still have random videos on my phone, but now I shoot mini videos with purpose and I might even have a enough b-roll footage to do something larger with all that extra in the future. Until that *one day* though, my kiddos will hopefully have a full 10 minutes (it I keep up with the 45-60 seconds/month I’m currently clocking) of each year of their lives. Edited. Ready to share. Ready to watch any time.

Tips & other thoughts: 

1. Real life. I went into it to capture real life. That means that I get a few creative moments in there such as using unique angles (camera lying on the ground or perfectly overhead are my favorites), capturing nature or skylines, piecing together two 1 second snippets to really make a moment (like Marley’s first steps), but for the most part I imagine that sometime far in the future what I’m really going to want is a mini diary of exactly what we were doing that year. So parking lots and unattractive vignettes and random stuff that is part of BIGGER stuff, you get to be in there, too. (plus, too much of life is scripted and styled these days)
2. Night time photography is tough. I’m sad to be missing videos of toasting at dinner or late night kiddo performances in our dining room, but right now the iPhone isn’t doing a great job of capturing video after the sun goes down so I try to stick to day.
3. No sweat. It’s okay if I miss a day or even a week :). No pressure, no sweat.
4. Minor edits. When I share little snippets (like a week or two) on Instagram, I might apply a filter at 25% just to boost the contrast. If I’m uploading a pretty dark video (such as the two snow images of Liv skiing and the girls sledding above), I might brighten it up. But minor edits only because otherwise the perfectionist will just keep going…

I get excited to take video these days. So much so I’m neglecting still photos and any sort of editing of them which has been both good and bad (Chatbook though – you’re next!). This is a great app, definitely recommend checking it out!