There are so many tiny, beautiful, funny, tragic moments in your life — how are you going to remember them all? Director Cesar Kuriyama is shooting one second of video every day as part of an ongoing project to collect all the special bits of his life. As it has had such a profoundly positive affect on him, he has passionately developed an app that makes it extraordinarily easy for anyone else to do it too.
The app, ‘One Second Everyday‘ is simply genius and gives you the opportunity to record life through your own eyes and acts as a fantastic memory trigger so you never forget another day of your life again….
My Story by Cesar Kuriyama
“It’s kind of a personal protest against the culture we have now where people are at concerts with their cellphones out recording the whole concert and they’re not even enjoying the show, they’re just watching the whole concert through their cellphone. I hate that. I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit back in the day..
So I’ve decided that the best way for me to capture and still keep a visual memory of my life and not be that person is to just record that one second that will allow me to trigger that memory of, yeah that concert was amazing, I really loved that concert.
It also helped me realise that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult. We tend to take our cameras out when we’re doing awesome things but we rarely do that when we’re having a bad day or something horrible is happening. I found it’s actually been very, very important to record even just one second of a really bad moment. It really helps you appreciate the good times…
What started out as a fun way to chronicle my year off quickly turned into something that forced me to reevaluate how we approach each day. Suddenly you realise that a couple of days may have gone by and you haven’t done anything remotely interesting or outside of your typical routine. It’s serving as a perpetual reminder to wake up and seize the day. It’s an easy and convenient method of retaining a visual journal of my life.
I sort of have a rule of first person perspective. Early on I think I had a couple of videos where you’d see me in it but I realised that wasn’t the way to go and the way to remember what I saw was to record it as I actually saw it.”
How to Use it
As promised, the app is ridiculously easy to use. You simply record a short video clip to capture your moment and then use the editing tool to choose the one second you want from that clip. It then saves the snippet and drops it into your timeline. Once it’s stored on your timeline, you can if you choose, back up your full clip and then delete it from your phone so you are not using up valuable storage. The chosen snippet from the clip will remain safely stored on the timeline.
You can at any time mash the clips together to create your movie. A new movie is created each time and does not overwrite your movie from the previous day, so you will need to delete the one before if you only want the most current version. You can also run multiple timelines if you so wish.
I am currently running four timelines! One for each of my children to capture their lives and also my own which will be predominantly taken from a first person perspective so the end result will be (as Cesar said) life as I actually saw it with my own eyes.
Also perfect if you’ve just had a baby and want to record their first year as shown below:
Once I’ve finished my first year I will post it on the blog so watch this space…!
