Show and Tell - A Second a Day Video

Today we did our Show and Tell Presentation on the idea of the “A Second a Day” videos that have become very popular recently.  These videos are literally a snippet from everyday of your life for a year, or more.  This requires us to take a video of something everyday.  Although it sounds like a lot, in reality, it isn’t all that much because a lot of us use Snapchat everyday and these videos are just a compilation of what we do on Snapchat.  The girl that made this specific video even said that she had a hard time picking just one second from each day, and some days she chose a few.  This demonstrates how much we document our lives, along with living them.  Taking pictures or videos of ordinary, daily things has become very prevalent.  The biggest example of that would probably be taking pictures of food.  What seems like an irrelevant part of most of our days has become the subject of many photos.  What we were focusing on with this video was the fact that we are always focused on documenting things in our lives, that sometimes we forget to actually experience the events first hand.

On the other hand, this is very unique and interesting idea to keep memories to look back on.  In a way, it is the new form of keeping a journal or diary.  Before, people used to write a little bit about each day in their diary, but now we all take pictures and videos to document our day instead.  So when you look at it that way, it serves more of a purpose and seems worthwhile.  I think there is a good balance between doing it as a memory item versus constantly videoing everything in our lives.  Doing a little bit each day isn’t terrible, it’s when we overload our daily lives with pictures, videos, and social media sharing that there becomes a loss in value.

We then contrasted this video with a similar video that was trying to send a message about domestic violence.  This video had a completely different tone and purpose than the first video.  The first video was for fun and was used more as a memory keepsake, but the second video served to educate people by showing the effects of domestic violence.  This video used powerful images to convey their message.

We also talked about the two videos together and how if the girl in the first video were to have had a bad event take place in her life, would she continue making the video, would she just not share it, or would she somehow document it?  When I thought about this I thought of if someone close to you died, most of us probably wouldn’t feel like taking a video each day for awhile.  Or if we did, we probably wouldn’t share that.  We tend to only share the best sides of ourselves on social medial and for others to view, which means we don’t always share the negative things in our lives.

But going along with that, the girl that made this video seemed to always be doing things everyday, having fun, and always hanging out with people.  I think that relates to the fact that she is college-aged, which is usually when most people have “the most fun in life.”  We aren’t 100% burdened with all the responsibilities of an “adult” life yet.  If a middle-aged adult were to make this video, I think it would have a very different tune because not every day is a great, fun day when you have lots of other responsibilities.  I think another different perspective would also be if someone recorded the same second of every day and put those together.  That would be a more realistic example of the lives we all live, instead of always picking out the best second of everyday.

Here are the links to both the videos we watched:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVcDLXOFUnk 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxT4HaE-ZdM