One Second, every day, for a year
Project Segundo
Or, “How I remembered every single day of 2017”
Nice clickbait on that second title.
Thanks, nice attitude, leave it at the door, because this one is a cute project. After 2016 I had completed Project 365, and I was looking for something with an extra 24 frames per second. Project Segundo (The Second Project – get it?) was a commitment I made to record a second of every day of 2017.
Like a diary?
Yeah, exactly, but with some non-bespoke rock music bedding, and occaisionally I’d feel a bit artistic. There’s some great memories in that there video, which you can watch below. I actually found myself getting a little emotional at “the good ole’ days”. The Dan in Project Segundo was a lot younger than today’s Dan, and some of the decisions he made were pretty stupid.
So why add it to your website?
Because I want you to do one. It doesn’t have to start on Jan 1st, that was just a happy coincidence, but I genuinely believe that everybody should try something like this once in their life. It doesn’t have to be glittery, that’s just my thing, but promising yourself to work on a long term project that lets you look back on your progress is wicked good shit, and that year I experimented a metric crap ton with my creativity.
Each second had the potential to be an entirely new creative experiment – but because there was no pressure – it didn’t matter if it didn’t blow anybody’s mind. Having the freedom to decide “today’s video will just be a nice* pigeon” vs. “today I’m going to experiment with some trippy lighting technique” allowed me to try things that I otherwise would’ve waited for a big project to trial.
There are elements in Project Segundo that I learnt from and used in commercial work later down the line. This was honestly the creative equivalent of going to the gym every day, and watching the final export of the project was incredibly rewarding.
So give this one a go yourself. You can film it on your phone, and I think there’s even apps nowadays that’ll remind you and edit the whole thing together automatically.
The project is your project, you decide the rules, and you decide what content you want to include or exclude. If you want to be visually expressive, go ahead, if it’s more about documenting how your year has gone, that’s cool as shit, you go, storyteller!
Once you’ve done the first month, send it over to me, I’d love to see how you’re doing. Good luck!
*I have no way of knowing if the pigeon was nice or not, we only met briefly