2025 Daily Clip Challenge

I've kept a written journal on and off for decades. I recently pulled out a stack of old notebooks from 30 years ago. Leafing through them provided some amazing insight into the person I once was. They were not always easy to read, but I choose to be forgiving of my past self as I think we all need to be.

Facebook and Instagram have replaced the written journal for many people seeking to store memories away, but that never really felt right to me. I never go back through my feed in any meaningful way. I know that nothing really replaces keeping a journal in physical notebooks, but I'm just not going to do it. The process of recording our lives needs to be easy and routine, otherwise its too difficult to keep it up.

This year I thought I would try something different. I challenged myself to shoot one short video clip every day. I like that it captures mundane moments that we would normally never think to record. Those moments are the ones I find most interesting when I read my old journals.

My thought was to edit together these short clips of daily life into a video without any real attempt at making them into something other than what they are, a set of mini scenes that form a mosaic snapshot of a period of time.

I'm not sure how successful this experiment will be. Watching it may be as exciting as watching paint dry but I found it oddly calming and nostalgic. I am happy I did it. I do like that the process encouraged me to take video clips of extremely everyday things. I know I will enjoy rewatching it years from now and being reminded of what life was like as a professional mentalist living in Washington, DC in January 2025.

January 2025

Here's my first attempt at creating a video journal.

So what happened in January 2025? David and I continued to prepare our house for sale by having the downstairs wood floors refinished. I took the opportunity to get clothing and personal archives organized in preparation for the move. We sold some furniture and unused camera gear and got a new washer & dryer. David spent half the month sick in bed with pneumonia so we ate lots of take-out. I had 9 performances of The Magic Duel and moved Musefeed.com to a new content management system. We tried to keep up with friends. And I clearly need to clean my bathroom mirror. Just a normal month.

Looking through the video I know that any clip is better than no clip but I wish I had taken a little more time to create prettier images. I'm a photographer and the aesthetics of the images does matter to me. That's something I can perhaps work on in the coming month. It also might be nice to track progress on any goals I'm working on at the moment. Just a thought.

I plan to keep it up in February and see how it goes. Making the video didn't take much time or effort this month and I think it's a cool artifact.