I'm so excited to share this with you all! Before we had our first daughter, I saw a video a couple made with a second-long video a day for their son's first year. I knew I wanted to do something similar, so when she was born, my husband and I started on the long and sometimes difficult task of taking at least one video a day of our daughter for her first year. Of course we usually took about five a day since she was our first, and we wanted to capture every little moment, every milestone, every sweet smile and coo. We succeeded in taking videos up to her first birthday. Of course we're still documenting her life in videos, as I'm sure every parent does now, but we won't be making a video of every year of her life. ;)
The difficult part came in editing the videos, and splicing them together to get the final video of her first year. Around the time that I was going to start editing the video our PC died. When looking for a replacement option, I decided to look for a video-editing option to make sure the new computer could handle it. We decided to go with a Mac because it comes with iMovie, so we didn't have to pay for anything additional. iMovie was perfect for what I wanted to do. You can import your videos, clip out whichever parts you'd like, and add them to your movie timeline. You can then edit the videos, changing the colors, contrast, lighting, crop the video, adjust the sound, etc. Then you can add titles, as I did with the day of the year for each video.
Lastly, you can add music to your timeline to play in the background, while still hearing the sound from the video clips if you want. I chose to use three songs because the length of the video required it. The first is her namesake song by Ben Folds, Adelaide. The second is "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge. While this may seem a bit random, this is the song I sang her to sleep to every night for that first year, so it is sentimental to her and I. The last is "My Wish" by Rascal Flats, which I've always thought perfectly describes the wish you have for your children.
Editing the video took me a year-and-a-half. Not because it was that difficult or time-consuming, but rather because I would only get about 15 days worth completed before leaving it for another few months. Then I'd pick it up and do another 15-30 days. So, it could have been completed much sooner if I'd just sat down to do it.
One thing I did in preparation for making the video which I would suggest, is I transferred all of our videos to the computer - those from my phone, my husband's, and any others. I put them all in folders based on the year, 2013 and 2014. Then within those folders I renamed each video with the date of the video, such as 08242013 for August 24th, 2013. If there were more than one video per day, I added a letter at the end, such as 08242013b and 08242013c. This greatly helped when making the video because for one, the videos are all organized in order of the date, from earliest to latest. And secondly, you can easily see how many videos you have to choose from for that particular date. It also makes it obvious if you missed a day of videos, which we did a few times. Don't tell anyone, but my secret for that, is to pull a video from the day before or after where your child is wearing a different outfit, and use that. No one will ever know! Organizing the photos probably took longer than actually making the video, but it really helps speed up the process of making the video. And for ever after you'll have all of the videos nicely organized in folders by year.
Hope this helps give a few pointers if you decided to do a video of your little one. I highly recommend it. I love being able to watch Adelaide's video and see her smiling for the first time, crawling, pulling up, and walking for the first time. All of those special moments memorialized into one video, of less than 10 minutes.
Without any further ado, please see the video of our daughter Adelaide's first year below. Hope you enjoy.
Adelaide's First Year
If the quality of the embedded video isn't great, you can see the video on youtube at the link below:
Let me know what you think in the comments. If you have any questions about how to make the video I'm happy to help! Now I need to start on Kyleen's video, as she's already 4.5 months old. Hopefully I'll finish hers before she's 2.5 years old! ;)
I love this. So wonderful. What a treasure for you all. Thanks for sharing. xoxo
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