Last year on Boxing Day I made the snap decision to record one second every day for a year. It made me think of Noah Kalina at the time.

It’s amazing to see my year in this way. It makes me happy to remember all the things I got up to; my memory is terrible and I wish I’d done this before now. I also could have used completely different clips to show a very different year. I forgot to record a lot and had to fill in the gaps as best I could but I’m impressed how well it came together.

It’s surprising how such short clips can tell such a story and throw me back into the moment. Can you imagine having one of these for every year you’d been alive? Every year of your parents’ lives?

I use the free version of 1SE on iPhone (the limitations are perfect for my purposes but I would like to remove their branding), which makes this all simple and automatic. The only difficult part is remembering to film one second every day (at least), however you can paper the gaps with images and live photos.

Seeing them at the end of a year has rejuvenated my interest and I’ve been consciously making short videos, ready for next year’s compilation.

Above: a time-lapse I made from my 9th floor flat in Sydney in 2015

I thought lockdown would make me prolific in my blog posting, but it didn’t turn out that way.

I lost my dad and my grandma which was, and continues to be, awful. This meant weeks spent in Edinburgh, my hometown. I also spent a lot of lockdown working on a lot of web-based projects for clients from home (or wherever I was).

One positive has been a lot of web development learning. I’ve taken a few different courses and I’m still going. I’d like to work on projects that align with my interests and and ideally my ideologies. I’ve got a few forthcoming web projects that I’d like to share here at some point. I added my GitHub link to the menu, if you are so inclined.

The title of this post comes from this incredible Van Morrison live performance which Lester Bangs famously wrote about.

I’ve been wanting to find a cheap, easy and fast way to capture (digitise) footage from my VHS and Hi-8 cameras into MacOS, so I could use them on projects. I found this generic video USB adapter that cost £7 and I’m actually pretty happy with it so far. Maybe there are more reliable or better quality options, but – for the price – this does exactly what I want.

At first I spent some time looking for drivers and software (it’s bundled with a CD but I don’t have a disc drive) but eventually found out that it’s plug and play and works fine – I just needed to know how to capture.

Quick Guide to Video Capture USB on MacOS

Turns out you can use Quicktime Player (other software will work too). If you open up QP and then hit Cancel (you don’t want to open other media just now). Then hit File > New Movie Recording.

After that, hit the down-arrow beside the record button and make sure to select USB 2.0 PC CAMERA and USB 2.0 MIC. On my first try I missed the audio and it recorded through my Macbook Pro mic. I spent a while fixing it in Final Cut before realising my error.

Once that’s done, hit the red record button (then play on your camera to capture something pre-recorded. Or go to record mode in your camera to film something live).

Finally, when you’re done recording, hit stop and make sure to save the video.

There’s lots of these available online – on eBay, Amazon, Alibaba and so on. Maybe others work differently, but I read that a lot of them use the same video capture chip.

Come to think of it, I’ve started adding videos to my portfolio and have a video section on my website now, where you can watch some things and also my YouTube channel for older videos, some from when I was at film school.

I’m looking forward to more video making soon and will leave you with the first test I shot. The blue screen is a camera issue that I fixed after this shot but errors and issues are things I love to embrace and work with: