At the start of 2018, I was determined to do a New Year’s resolution. When I think of New Year’s resolutions, the first ones that come to mind are eating healthy, going to the gym every day, or to not spend as much time on social media. Like everyone else, I have tried to stick to my New Year’s resolution, but by the time February rolls around, I always seem to lose interest in what I started. 2018 was going to be different though. I was going to actually stick with it this time. I just needed to find something I actually wanted to do.
On January 2, 2018, I was scrolling through YouTube and found several videos titled something along the lines of “My Year in Review” or “One Second a Day for a Year”. For all of 2017, these YouTubers took short video clips every single day so at the end of the year they had a six or seven minute video to look back on and remember their year. After watching these videos, I knew this is what I wanted my New Year’s Resolution to be.
New York City
As a communications media production major, this was the perfect project for me to work on. Since I did not watch the YouTube videos until January 2, I did not have a video for January 1 so I was already off to a bad start. Luckily, my mom had taken a video of my family and I ringing in the new year, which is the clip that I chose to start my video with. I was not used to having to remember to take a video every day which resulted in me setting two alarms to go off on a daily basis, one at 12:00 pm and the other at 10:00 pm. My mom, who also decided to take on this project, and I would text each other every day to remind each other to take videos.
Hall & Oates concert.
When people watch my video, some assume I waited until the end of the year to edit all my videos together. To make it easier on myself, I sent my videos from my phone to my computer and added in my newest video to the video editor the same day I took it, editing down the clip to just two seconds. This helped me to not get overwhelmed and allowed me to save memory on my phone since I deleted them as soon as they were on my computer.
Some days I would miss a perfect video opportunity because I did not have my phone ready. Some days I would not do anything exciting and have to take a video of me reading a book or sitting on my couch watching TV. And then there were some days where I did several exciting things but had to pick just one video to represent my day.
Decorating our Christmas tree
For anyone looking for a New Year’s Resolution, I think this is a great and inexpensive project to do throughout the year. Although it is the end of January, it is never too late to start taking videos. If you have Mac or an iPhone, iMovie is a free and easy video editor that you can use to compile your videos. Some other free video editing softwares are Windows Movie Maker or DaVinci Resolve.
So get out there and start taking videos! It will be a great way to cherish your memories for years to come.
Click here to watch my 2018 video!
(All pictures are screenshots from my video)