For the third year in a row, I’ve made a “One Second Every Day” video. The concept is simple (and easy to do with an app on my phone) — record video or take photos every day of the year. For each day, select a single second of video (or pick a still photo). Then, “mash” them all together into a continuous video. The 1SE app handles all of this part. I add the music separately using iMovie.
Here is my video for 2016:
Music
Other than remembering to record video every day, choosing the music is the hardest part about creating these. I always feel like I’m picking a soundtrack for the year.
This year was especially difficult. We lost Xena, our 18-year old Siamese cat, back in January. Then we lost Cricket, our rat terrier mix, in October. Finally, the presidential election was in November, with a result that I did not expect and am not at all happy about.
October and November is when I usually start playing around with the seconds I’ve saved so far and experimenting with songs that might work with the video. So my initial song candidates were quite a bit less positive and sadder than the two I did finally choose. I had to remind myself that the year was bigger than our losses.
Renee actually helped find the second song — “Sing On,” by Jewel. I felt it fit well because it is optimistic, while at the same time suggesting that some things might be a struggle.
Past Years
The first year I did this, I was sort of sneaky and did not tell Renee about it. I started about a week into 2014, so the early parts of that video showed some of her brain surgery recovery. That video also reflected huge life changes for us — a new job, moving, a new house, adjusting to commuting by bus, and so on.
Last year I did another video, but just posted it to YouTube and Facebook without doing a blog post. That year seemed uneventful compared to 2014.
Here are those past videos:
2015:
2014
2017
I am hoping that my 2017 in Six Minutes video will document a good year for us. Renee should be finishing school and getting into more interesting work at her new job. I’ll continue doing work I enjoy in my current job. We have plans to visit Glacier National Park this summer with friends. We will keep making progress with the formerly-feral kitten Canyon — maybe she’ll even be willing to get in a lap someday! The dogs and cats (and us!) will (hopefully) stay healthy.
But when I started this project back in 2014, I had no idea I would be documenting a move to a new house in a new state with a completely different sort of job. When I started recording last January first (the shot of Canyon checking out the bedroom dresser), I didn’t know we’d be saying good bye to both Xena and Cricket by the end of the year.
Which is just another way of acknowledging that no one knows what the future — and specifically 2017 — will look like.
In this morning’s Sunday paper, I read this article by Danny Westneat: Dead white dudes don’t corner the market on words of wisdom. He was writing about Seattle University students complaining about the overwhelming emphasis on studying work by “dead white dudes” and the fact that they took action by actually compiling an alternate reading list of diverse works. He talks about the influence unconscious bias in forming reading lists and curricula, using his own participation in a book club as an example.
The list of books the students suggested is interesting as well. I consider myself to be fairly well-read and open to many different authors and writing, so I was a bit surprised to realize that I’ve only read two of the books. I read both of them in college, way back in the early 1990s. Coincidentally, I started re-reading one of them (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich) about a week ago.
This got me thinking about college, and the fact that this “dead white male” complaint has been around for a long time and is nothing new. And I guess I’m just a little surprised that this is still a matter of debate and controversy.
Why is there such resistance to including alternate perspectives in what is supposed to be higher education? What bad could possibly come from including more voices, more ideas, more perspectives on life and history?
It makes me think of the type of people who want to ban books, as though exposure to ideas they disagree with is somehow dangerous. This is another impulse I’ve never been able to understand. You can read books containing ideas you disagree with. You will either change your ideas based on what you’ve read, or you’ll keep your ideas, but have more understanding of the opposing view. Either way, you come out ahead, a bit closer to truth. Where is the downside?
Anyway, this column sent me back through my memories of my own college years. I earned my degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was a “Rhetoric” major, which was their way of referring to “Creative Writing” major (I think they have since renamed this major, which is a good thing). This was offered by the English department and was essentially like an English degree with several additional writing classes. We had to fulfill many of the same requirements that English majors did, which meant that I took a lot of literature courses. There was plenty of emphasis on the “western canon” and “dead white males.” One requirement I remember was an entire class on Shakespeare, for instance. (As a side note, I looked up the current degree requirements, and it appears that Shakespeare is still required).
But when I think back to the books and stories that were the most memorable for me in those college years, it is not the dead white male works. I spent years in high school reading western literature. It was nothing new. No, the books that stick out in my mind, the ones that I’ve kept all these years and have even re-read a few times would probably be right at home on that list from the Seattle University students.
In either my junior or senior year, I took a newly-offered elective class on Native American Literature. The class initially focused on oral literature that had been written down. Given the vast history of these tales, and the perhaps rough translation from oral tradition to written work, it was a bit like working through Chaucer or Shakespeare. It took effort. The effort wasn’t always fun, but it was certainly rewarding.
Then the class moved into more modern literature and we read books by Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, D’Arcy McNickle, and many others. Again, I was in a world I did not recognize, a world defined by poverty and reservations and about as far from my own middle-class upbringing as you could get.
And if you were to ask me today to name some of my favorite books, you’ll find a few books from that class on the list: Love Medicine by Louse Erdrich, The Surrounded by D’Arcy McNickle, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko.
The trade paperback copies of those books that I bought in a college bookstore sometime around 1991 or 1992 are still on my bookshelf. I’ve hauled them with me from apartment to apartment, house to house, from Illinois to Montana and finally Washington. Never once in over twenty years have I even briefly considered relinquishing those titles to the “book donation pile.” I’ve re-read Ceremony at least once since college; one of these days I’ll re-read The Surrounded, and I expect it will have even more meaning than the first time, after living in Montana and visiting places mentioned in the book.
Any college class that can put books on my lifetime list of favorite books is worthwhile!
Many years ago, when I still lived in Illinois and owned a house in Aurora, Cricket found a nest of baby bunnies in the back yard. They were in a little hole, under a small picnic table. Cricket was much younger then (probably around 4 or 5 or so) and very much wanted to chase and eat the rabbits.
Newly Born Bunnies
Laura (my partner at the time) and I had to go to a bit of effort to supervise Cricket and keep her from tearing up the nest. Later, as they became more mobile, I remember her chasing one across the yard. The bunny made it across the yard and hid behind the fence post. It squeaked while it ran, which for some reason surprised me.
Baby bunny hiding behind a fence post
Recently, I have been thinking about those baby rabbits. Back in May, we planted some pepper seedlings in several big pots (I’m a big fan of container gardening). Anaheim, banana peppers, and one variety of bell peppers. The pots all congregated in a sunny corner by the deck stairs.
Freshly-planted peppers!
A few days later, I was in the kitchen when Renee went down the deck steps and I heard her gasp. I followed her down the steps and discovered that some of the new plants were chopped down to just stems! All the leaves and most of the stem, completely gone!
This is one of the pots that was especially hard hit:
Pepper plants have been decimated!
After some research, we decided that the pepper plant eating fiend was most likely a rabbit. Which made me think of those baby bunnies whose lives I saved back in 2005.
You’d think I earned some good bunny karma. But apparently not.
Anyway, we moved the pots up onto a table and out of reach of marauding rabbits. The untouched peppers continued to thrive, and, much to my surprise, the stubby stems of the eaten peppers began to grow back. After a few weeks, they looked like seedlings again, full of new leaves. By today, they had tiny buds just waiting to open up. They are pretty far behind the plants that were spared (we already harvested a couple small anaheims), but hopefully the growing season is long enough that we might get a few peppers out of them.
Today, Renee built a nice new garden bed, replacing some shaggy bushes that used to live along the garage. We used cool decorative brackets for the ends, and Renee stained the wood a nice red color. We had a minor glitch when the boards holding up the upper level bowed a bit; had to fix that with an emergency cross-brace. But otherwise it turned out great.
We went ahead and transplanted the recovered plants. Hopefully, having more room to spread their roots will help them catch up! Supposedly bunnies are less interested in more mature pepper plants, but we will be keeping an eye on these…if the thieving rabbit returns, we’ll put up some sort of fencing around the new bed.
Some of the peppers, nearly two months after being a meal for rabbits:
These peppers grew back from bare little stems
The new planting bed
I love our new planting bed – and I love the fact that this garden story may have a happy ending after all.
Last year, I wrote a coupleposts summarizing 2013, with all of its good and bad. This year, I have a video summary instead. The video is a collection of one-second clips – one per day – all mashed together.
I’ve already shared this video on Facebook, but I sort of wanted to get back to blogging again…and this video seemed like a good way to get started.
Some things I’ve learned from doing this project, and more about how I put it together below.
The Year
I didn’t get started recording my video clips until Jan. 8, 2014, so I missed the first week or so of the year. When I started, I knew I would be seeing some significant life changes, but I didn’t know the extent. Renee was busy recovering from brain surgery (you can see that she is a bit spaced out in the January video clips). I knew I only had six months left at my job and would need to find something new. But I had no idea that “finding a new job” would morph into a cool job at a huge tech company, selling two houses, and moving 9 hours away from Missoula. Or making Darwin be an urban dog for two months!
The interesting thing to me is the way the video sums up all the events of the year, and seems to portray the events in chunks:
Renee’s brain surgery recovery.
Lots of snow.
Working on my parents’ new house in Lolo (lots of painting, supervising the new carpet, snowblowing, etc.).
Lots of dog walks along the river in Missoula and a little camping.
Preparing for the move.
Me moving to Seattle with just Darwin and Xena for 2 months and living in a temporary city apartment. Darwin did great as a “city dog” during that time.
Renee finally coming out to Seattle and us moving into our new house.
One thing that the video doesn’t show very well was our legal marriage in Spokane back in July. I have a couple shots from the trip to Spokane, but it isn’t very obvious why were were there. In retrospect, I should have grabbed a video of the courthouse or something. One irony I’ve noticed with this project – sometimes the days in which the most cool stuff happens are the days I’m most likely to forget to record a video clip.
Recording and Selecting One-Second Clips
I made the video using an app called 1 Second Everyday. It is very easy to use. Just open it up and tap the “Timelines” button and it displays a calendar. Days for which there are videos on the phone are highlighted in yellow. Tap a day, and you can review all the videos that were recorded on that day and select the 1-second clip for the day.
You can tap a button in the app to launch the video camera on the phone, but you don’t have to. I recorded most of my video normally (outside the app) and then opened the app to pick my seconds later.
On days when you forget to record video, there is an option to select a photo instead – so there are a few spots in my video with still photos. However, there is an annoying limitation with this – you can only use a photo if no video exists on that day. There were a few times when I had both video and photos for a day, and I liked a particular photo better. The only way to use that photo in that case is to delete the video from the phone first. This seems silly to me; I should be able to choose whatever best represents the day myself.
When selecting the second to use, you can fairly easily scrub through the video to choose the second to use.
Once you choose the video clip for a day, it is stored within the 1SE app, so you can delete the original video file from the phone. I was a little bit paranoid of losing data, so I always backed up all my video clips to my computer before clearing them off the phone. The downside of this paranoia was that my phone’s free space became extremely low during times when I was lazy and didn’t do these backups regularly. The other downside is that now my computer hard drive is full of short video clips, most of which are fairly meaningless on their own.
Also, of course, as the year went on, the 1SE app itself consumed more and more space. A single one-second video clip is pretty small…getting close to 365 of them adds up after a while. At the moment, I still have all the 2014 1-second clips on my phone, but I may have to clear them out eventually and only keep one year at a time.
Making the Final Movie
The 1SE app did most, but not all of the work in making this movie. At any point, you can choose to “compile” your 1-second clips into a video. The app “mashes” all the clips together into a continuous video. Note that you don’t have to do a whole year at once – you can choose a custom time interval. (As an aside, I just now discovered that a recent app update lets you create a video in reverse – starting with the most recent date and going backwards. I wonder how that would change the feel of the movie?)
The resulting movie is pretty cool even on its own, but I wanted to add music to mine. So I had to go through a bit of a rigamarole to transfer the mashed video to my computer, load it up in iMovie, then select and add the music tracks. This proved a bit more difficult than it should have been. For some reason, the video as created by 1SE would only play within the 1SE app or within the “Photos” app on my iPhone; it would not play correctly when I transferred it to iMovie on my Mac.
It must have been a formatting glitch of some sort, because I solved it after much cursing and experimenting by opening the file up in Quicktime Player [CHECK NAME OF APP], then exporting it to a new file as a 720p movie. The exported version worked fine. I have no idea why I had to do this.
This particular year it made sense to split the video across two songs – the first half (Montana) and the second (Seattle/Kirkland). I’m fairly pleased with the songs I found for this – “Ends of the Earth” by Lord Huron, and “West Coast” by Coconut Records. Both of these songs happen to be ones I discovered shortly after moving to Seattle, while still living in the temporary apartment.
The end result turned out better than I expected. I’ve already started recording my 1-second clips for 2015. I don’t expect the changes in the 2015 version to be quite so dramatic, but I’m curious to see how it turns out!
This brings back some memories! I did not have one of those original Macs from 1984, but I do remember visiting a computer store with my dad and playing around with MacPaint on one of their demo machines. I’m not sure when it was, but it was definitely an early model. And I decided right then that I really wanted a Mac myself.
We actually had a computer back then, an Apple II+ that we had since I was in grade school. At the time this was pretty unusual; none of my friends my age had computers at home, and I don’t think we had any at school, either. I used to plunk around on that thing all the time, mostly playing games, but also occasionally experimenting with programming in BASIC.
I was motivated to learn how to type for real because I got tired of the hunt and peck method every time I wanted to type in the command to play Space Invaders.
It was a big deal when my dad installed a chip in that thing that gave it the ability to display both upper and lower case letters, rather than just all upper case.
I also have this vague, excessively geeky memory of checking out computer magazines from the library that contained the code for various games and programs…and then typing all that code in. I find it hard to believe today that this was something people actually did. Just to make sure I didn’t imagine this, I had to look it up. Yes, it was a real thing, and I really did this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program
A few years later, in 1987, I worked out a deal with my parents to get a Macintosh SE. I know I helped pay for it, but I suspect they footed the majority of the bill. The Mac SE was an upgrade over that initial model – it had two floppy drives instead of one, and it had the “superdrive” that could read 1.4 MB floppies. So you could store an entire megabyte of data on a single disk! Megabytes. Not gigabytes. How far we have come in 30 years!
Mac SE (photo from Wikipedia)
I was a junior in high school in 1987. I used that Mac for all sorts of things – typing out school papers, writing short stories, writing letters to my sister in college (I used Microsoft Word to format the letters in columns, like a newspaper, and called it The Waubonsee News since that was the name of our street. I wish I still had copies of those letters.), making greeting cards and big posters that I printed out on our dot-matrix printer.
That computer came with me to college, where I kept it in a computer cabinet that my dad built (he was really into woodworking in those days). I remember the convenience of having my own computer and only using the computer lab when I need to print on the laser printers.
Eventually I splurged on a 40 MB hard drive so I didn’t have to keep swapping floppy disks in and out of the drives. Again, megabytes, not gigabytes. And at the time it seemed like way more space than I would ever need.
A little over a decade later, my first iPod could hold 500 times more storage. And fit in my pocket. What a difference!