Have you ever been at a concert, or a school play, or a football game — and some yahoo next to you is filming the whole thing on their phone? They’re not living in the moment so much as composing a Facebook post.
But what if you could unobtrusively take a quick video, like a one-second snapshop that would remind you of the memory later? And what if you could splice all those seconds together after a month, or a year, or on your 80th birthday and watch them in chronological order, life-flashes-before-your-eyes style? Wouldn’t that be amazing?!
That was the vision of 30-year Cesar Kuriyama when he created One Second Everyday (1SE). The app launched in 2013, two weeks after his KickStarter campaign and got more than 100,000 downloads in its first month. And that’s exactly what you do with it: Record a one second daily video to your timeline. Later you can compile these snippets in short films and share them with your friends.
Cesar used to work in an ad agency as a 3D animator. Which makes him like us. Then one day he saw Stefan Sagmeister’s TED Talk about The Power of Time Off and decided to quit his job, take a road trip and explore the idea of One Second Everyday. Since then, he’s recorded one second from his daily life for the past three years. Jon Favreau, the actor/director behind movies like Swingers and Iron Man learned about the app thru Twitter and featured it in his latest movie CHEF, which is how I heard about it.
Cesar’s 7-minute TED Talk is profound. (And the talk that inspired him about taking periodic work sabbaticals is also worth watching).
I started taking my one-second videos a couple weeks ago. Wanna see it? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, LOL. The point is, if we’re religious about shooting the daily second, we’ll have a 6-minute film a year from now. And an one-hour film 10 years from now. Wouldn’t it be fun to hold screening parties with your friends? There are many cool ideas that could come from this.
Once you get into the habit, it’s difficult to choose what seconds to include from each day. Since you can only choose one, I find myself taking a lot more pictures and videos and backing everything up to my Google drive. But you won’t catch me with my phone up in the air, filming an entire event. So that makes one less yahoo in the world. And conversely, if a I have 3-day streak of meh seconds, I know it’s time to seek out new people and adventures. Try it, it will teach you to live your life as if it’s a movie.
