Yearly Seconds
Near the end of 2014, I stumbled across a YouTube video of someone recording one second of video every day for an entire year. That really inspired me. So in 2015 - my senior year of high school, while working on Animal Science research in the honors Agriculture program - I started recording a video every single day. That first film documented my life and all my experiences, and I wanted to keep it going. A beautiful time capsule full of memories, running continuously for over a decade now.
Eleven annual films completed. Over 4,000 individual seconds captured. A longitudinal self-portrait built one frame at a time.
The Philosophy
I just wanted to document my life. Record a video whenever I remembered, or whatever was the highlight of my day. At the end of each year, organize and sort all the footage, trim everything down to one-second clips, compile them into a timeline, label them, and add some music. I am glad I did all that. I am able to look back and keep track of and see the growth throughout the years - from my Animal Science experiments, to graduation, my first job interview, so many firsts.
The Videos
The Process
Capture
Every single day, record one second of video. No rules about content, composition, or quality. The camera might capture a sunset, a subway platform, a meal being prepared, or nothing more than a ceiling at 11:59 PM. The only requirement is existence - one second must be recorded before midnight.
Compile
At year's end, all 365 clips are assembled in strict chronological order with zero editorial intervention. No cuts, no transitions, no color grading, no audio mixing. The constraint IS the creative framework. The raw sequence of seconds tells a story that no amount of editing could replicate - the unfiltered cadence of a year as it was actually experienced.
Reflect
Each completed annual film becomes a compressed memoir that reveals patterns invisible in real-time. Seasons change across a few seconds. Faces appear and recur. Environments shift as life circumstances evolve. What felt mundane in the moment - a morning coffee, a walk to work - becomes profound when viewed in the context of 364 other seconds. The annual film transforms individual moments into a longitudinal portrait.
Why It Matters
This is one of my most personal projects. It started as a simple idea inspired by a stranger's YouTube video, and turned into a decade-long commitment to documenting my own life. No client, no deliverable, no audience expectation. Just the discipline of recording one second every day and the reward of looking back and seeing the growth.
The eleven completed films serve as an archive of an entire decade of life. The environments change - high school, college, studios, cities. The tools change - from Android phones to iPhones, GoPros, body worn cams, drones, proper cameras. But the one-second constraint remains constant, providing a fixed point against which everything else can be measured.
One second per day is a constraint so minimal it seems trivial. But sustained over 4,000+ consecutive days, it produces something no other process could - a raw, unfiltered, longitudinal record of a life in motion. From Animal Science experiments to graduation to a pandemic to building a career in creative technology.
Now past the decade milestone, the accumulated body of work gains weight that no single film could carry. Each annual compilation is interesting on its own. Together, they become something else entirely: a decade-long time-lapse of a human life, compressed into about an hour of total footage.
