Featured image by Pixlr AI Image Generator
After a 4 year hiatus, I resumed one of my personal projects. Using the 1 second everyday app on my iPhone, I film 1 second of video every single day. Then at the end of each month, I add background music and a thumbnail image, and publish the result. My new year resolution for 2024 is to keep this up and end the year with 12 monthly compilation videos.
The purpose of this project is to simply have a daily video journal to look back at both the exciting and boring days in my life. I don't do the popular social media like Instagram and Twitter, so this is where I "post" instead. I haven't missed a day since I picked this back up and so far, my only observation is that there's pretty much nothing to show of my job, which is a huge part of my life. I've basically never filmed work-related videos because I don’t want to risk the possibility of revealing anything confidential.
I started out hosting the finished videos on vimeo, and then quickly realized that I'm only allowed 3 videos on a free account. So now I've moved them all over to YouTube.
Music
Cesar Kuriyama, the founder of 1 second everyday, is against adding background music. From his blog:
Personally I'm against adding music to my 1 Second Everyday project. Being able to listen to any particular moment is crucial to remembering it. The sound of my dad laughing... Tina Fey's Bossypants audio book while I'm driving through Tennessee... even the sound of slapping my cousin hello brings me back, haha :)
Not to mention that music directs you towards a certain mood. And some of these seconds can switch from joy to sorrow, then back to joy in literally a heart beat.
However, I personally choose to add background music for the same reason. It sets the mood for the entire video and provides some sense of cohesiveness to what would otherwise be a series of clips without any context.
Perspective
1SE video creators often use a variety of perspectives, whatever best suits that day's second. However, Cesar Kuriyama says in his TED talk that he prefers to film from a first-person perspective. My preference is to change up the perspectives when possible. Most of my clips are filmed from a point-of-view perspective, but there are a handful that aren't. Although I don't like to show my face so much, I occasionally film selfie-style, where I'm in the clip.