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.