As with many ventures into the unknown, there’s a slight thrill in relying purely on belief when embarking on a project that requires discipline, perseverance and, sometimes, months or years of action.
But having a good idea of the final product and how you’re going to bring it all together helps with the process from inception, so here’s a blog about how I constructed my project and video, Every Moment Counts.
(It’s worth noting that there are lots of other people who have done these projects and perhaps they used a different technique for their final video).
Taking the photos:
Work out the angle you want to take your shot from. Keeping this consistent really helps make the final video look professional and well thought out (sometimes, especially at the beginning of my 1000Photos project when I hadn’t put much thought into what I was doing, the angle of my face changed daily. Try and keep it straight on.)
For the best effect, do your best to keep your face central in the image, this will reduce editing time later. Also, ensure your image is in landscape for better final effect. Compare this landscape video to this portrait one, to see what I mean.
I totally failed on these two, but using the same camera and taking your daily shot in roughly similar lighting conditions will add to the quality of your final video.
Taking Photo 980 with Lois Pryce, Austin Vince and Ben Fogle
And how it looked. Austin purposefully hid, and...come on Ben, smile!
Other tips
- Throughout the project, store and edit photos week by week, or month by month. (I got a bit slack sometimes and ended up having to scour my photo library for the photos, and then edit all 1000 in one go. It took a solid week!)
- Back your shots up to an external hard drive.
- Be creative with your photos. Don’t be afraid to show some personality, or how you’re feeling at that moment.
- Ask people to be in your photo when possible, it makes a great addition to the project and a much more interesting video than just a pale-faced bloke in the same room every day.
The final video
I compiled my photos in Final Cut X (but you could do the same in iMovie or most other editing programmes), created a compound clip (all of the photos as part of a video clip) and then sped it up. I rendered the video to 1080p, uploaded to my YouTube channel and did a bit of research on what other photo project videos had used for keywords, titles and descriptions.
Some projects have millions of hits, some just a few thousand. It remains to be seen how many this one will get, but either way, it was super fun to do and is both a great way to retain memories, and a grand incentive to make each day count.
So without further ado, here’s the final video:
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