Have you ever seen one of those videos that is a compilation of one-second videos that document a person’s life? The first one that I ever saw was incredibly memorable because it was of a person who had taken a photo every single day for ten years. It showed how they had changed from a 14-year-old boy into a 24-year-old man, and I found it surprisingly moving.
As well as selfie shots, these types of videos can also be comprised of favorite memories with friends, while at work, or those holidays that you don’t want to forget about. The mix of mundane and memorable can often make for a more accurate recounting of a person’s life.
Every time I’ve watched one of these videos, I’ve thought, “I really should do the same,” but for various reasons, I’ve never actually followed through with it. I wonder if I’d be disciplined enough or sufficiently committed to the cause to make it happen. I’m sure I’d start strong, but I doubt I’d see it through.
Homescreen heroes
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
Then I came across an app called One Second (1SE), which is a dedicated app that helps you manage your daily memories so you can focus solely on capturing the required content. I thought this could be just the app I needed to finally make the movie of my life. With that in mind, I put on my imaginary director’s hat, downloaded the app, and cracked on with my life’s movie.
Picking and choosing memories
The first thing I realized was that I didn’t want to wait years to create a movie of my life. I’m not one of those people who feel like they need everything in life served up instantly, but I was certainly not in the mood to wait longer than I had to. That’s why I was glad to discover the Smart Fill feature, which automatically adds bulk selections of photos and videos to the correct dates in your timeline.
I knew this would still require a process of manually going through my back catalog of photos, but being able to bulk select photos would be a lot quicker than adding a photo or video for each day.
Unfortunately, 1SE only lets you access on-device media and therefore won’t let you select from a cloud-based repository such as Google Photos. As someone who has decades worth of photos stored in the cloud, this meant I had to go through the frustratingly laborious process of transferring media from Google Photos onto my iPhone. If 1SE could add Google Photos integration, then that would be infinitely easier, but for now, you should be prepared for this step.
Creating memory videos is a total breeze
Anyway, with that first hurdle cleared, I was ready to create a specific memory video. The 1SE app provides suggestions that let users automatically create videos of specific months, years, or seasons, or you can manually select the snippets you want to include. I love an easy life, so I picked the ‘month’ preset.
From there, you can adjust the speed, overlay some licensed music from the library, adjust the video orientation, apply filters, and more. All of these features are seamlessly integrated into the app, easy to use, and surprisingly useful for creating a customized video.
With all the edits and settings nailed down, the last step involves exporting the video in either HD quality (1080p) or standard quality (720p). The choice will be determined by where you’re planning to post or store the resulting video, although I think users should choose the best quality every time. This will not only produce better results but will also help your video stand the test of time.
With the video exported, you’re then free to share your creations with the waiting world, whether that be with family or friends on WhatsApp or on YouTube for the public to see.
Get 1SE Pro and direct like a pro
The core 1SE app is free to use, but if you’d like access to its premium features or are keen to support the growing development team, then you should consider upgrading to 1SE Pro.
The main difference between free and pro is that there are no limits to the number of projects or snippets you can create. Any memories you upload are securely backed up, and 1SE branding is removed from the end of videos. I also love that you gain the ability to access a library of licensed music for adding soundtracks to creations.
If you’re serious about creating memory videos, either for yourself or for a friend or family member, then you’ll want to upgrade to Pro. You can do this for $4.99/£9.99 per month or $49.99/£49.99 per year.
But first, why not give the free version a go by downloading the app on Apple or Android.
