This was my first year completing the one second a day, everyday for a year project.
Things I learned on my first attempt:
- I missed about 3-5 days on 3 months completely, so I need to be better about this. I had an alarm on my google calendar I started to ignore around April when I first started missing days. I think this year I’ll start logging when I shoot instead, or try one of the many free phone apps available for this project. I just put everything together chronologically sans the missing days.
- I need to stop panning. Part of the panning was to grab large scenes, but my video is about 3 minutes overall longer than it should be because one second turned into two or three for some clips just so the second wouldn’t be a total blur. The result of wild, too quick panning is that the video gets a little dizzying at times. Part of the problem is I had many group scenes to shoot and I just aimed the camera around the scene instead of picking a spot and shooting a video. I had this fear in the beginning that without enough movement, some shots would look like still photos, but with anything moving in the video (as opposed to a still building), you don’t have to worry too much about that. I completed a few vlogs with Frankie earlier in the year and movement that was fine in 10 second clips were a total blurry mess in one to three second clips. I need to start shooting keeping the one second in mind.
- Shooting Instagram stories in horizontal and saving the videos saved me on many, many, many days. I would be missing 90 days out of my year without boomerangs and Instagram story videos. Sadly many videos were taken vertically, but often times I did remember to shoot horizontally. This next year, I will just plan to get in the habit of doing this more often.
- Choose well lit scenes. This seems like a give in, but it’s hard to remember this over 365 days and many dark videos were out of last minute panic. Even if i had a buddy turn the flashlight of their phone on, it would have immensely helped my videos.
- Avoid using the selfie cam. The quality of the selfie camera on a phone compared to the regular camera is much more noticeable in the video than it was played back on my phone. This year, I hope to mostly use the regular cell phone camera, a point and shoot, and possibly a Go Pro to get better videos.
- I should have assembled my videos, weekly since I wasn’t using an app. Doing it all at the end of the year was a challenge, because December can be an extremely busy month.
All in all, this video, for better or worse was a perfect metaphor for 2017. 2017 for me was a huge year of transition. This video is perfectly imperfect, yet complete in its own way, and did capture beautiful moments between friends and family, and memories made this past wonderful year.
I loved shooting the seconds and putting it together. I’m setting the intent to do it for 2018 too!
I’m relying on my being more together this new year.
Thank you everyone who was part of my 2017!
Rachel Lamb
EDITED to add:
I used my phone and Adobe Premiere. I have a Droid and my photos sync to my Google photos, and Google photos organizes the videos by date so I just put them into Premiere chronologically from there. I did video editing because I thought I’d use a combo of my phone and cameras, but since I only used my phone, I might as well have used a cell phone app and the process would have been simpler possibly.
