Revisiting 2013 one second at a time

Happy New Year! With the arrival of 2014, I’m resolving to blog more often… a resolution I’ve failed to keep for the past several years, but it’s worth another shot. The first thing I was looking forward to share in 2014 is my complete 1 Second Everyday video for last year.

The video was created with 1 Second Everyday, an app that was launched on Kickstarter. With it, I was able to piece together one-second daily clips recapping 2013, including glimpses of things as exciting as Comic-Con, and as mundane as driving home in rush-hour traffic. Some moments were obviously captured in a panic at the end of the day, lacking anything more interesting than what was around me moments before going to bed. And some were definitely planned, meaningful events that I knew I wanted to be a part of this compilation.

It’s a compelling retrospective for me, of course, and something I think I’ll enjoy even more as time passes. I’m especially intrigued by how important the natural sounds of each moment turned out to be. I can close my eyes and just listen to the seconds, and see in my minds eye much more drawn from my memory than was captured by my iPhone.

But this video, or at least videos like it, apparently resonate with others, too. It conveys many facets of someone else’s life in a way that photo albums or blog posts can’t. It’s not a pure, honest documentary, of course, but it somehow feels more real.

The geek in me can’t help but note that there are a few technical glitches in the video. Missing date stamps, missing audio for a few days, and probably other things I haven’t noticed. These are mostly my fault, as I upgraded early to iOS 7 (which was very glitchy and crashy), before the 1SE developers were ready for it. In fact, up until recently, a lot of users were unable to get usable video out of the app at all, as Apple had made a small, undocumented change to its iOS video codec. Fortunately, most (but not all) of these hiccups have been ironed out… just in time to create countless “year in review” videos.

Discover more from Hawaii Blog

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading