Note: You can find this year’s 1 Second Every Day video and all of the past compilations I’ve made in this playlist.
After taking a course called Designing Your Stanford during my sophomore year, I was inspired to find more ways to incorporate reflection into my day-to-day life. Doing so has a number of benefits, including helping me slow down, be more mindful of how I spend my time, and better appreciate the people around me. One of my favorite ways of reflecting is through a personal video project called One Second Every Day (1SE), for which I got the idea in 2017 after seeing a friend post his work online. 1SE involves filming a second of footage every single day and then stitching all of the clips together at the end of the year. For anyone interested, I highly recommend watching the original TED Talk by Cesar Kuriyama in which he explains his motivations for starting the project and its relevance in our fast-paced, smartphone-driven world.
There’s an official 1SE app available for only a few dollars that makes recording your segments and combining them super easy, but I choose to handle all of the videography and editing myself, using just my iPhone’s stock Camera app and DaVinci Resolve. Besides being a thrifty option, forgoing the official app also gives me greater control over small details that matter to me, such as the exact font, language, and positioning of the date that appears in the lower left corner of each second.
When I started doing 1SE I had no idea if I would be able to stick with the project. My biggest fears were that I would simply forget to film my daily clips, or that it would be overly stressful trying to remember to do so and consequently I would come to resent the project. I soon discovered, however, that I had no problem remembering to record every day, and the fact that each video is just one second means the process takes no time at all. I’ve been capturing seconds for over seven years now, and in that time I’ve only ever forgetten to film a handful of times.
I think one of the coolest aspects of 1SE is that even though each second may seem quite short, the unique sounds, images, and colors of a given clip still often bring back tons of memories from that day. I also appreciate how my videos capture the incredible breadth of experiences that I live, ranging from triumphant to lonely, action-packed to tranquil, light-hearted to serious. It’s something that’s had a meaningful impact on my own happiness (it’s also just a fun creative project to keep up on the side), and I hope to continue it well into the foreseeable future.