My friend Fred Urfer has been taking second long videos every day since 2013. At the end of the year, he compiles them into one video. He recently released his video for 2017:
He has videos for 2016 and 2015 as well (you can see those at the end of this piece). Watching these is like watching a collage of a life and it’s fascinating. And I know Fred. He and I are both improvisers at the Magnet Theater. We met while doing a show called The Blob. We’re now on the same Magnet house team Sexy Baby and we briefly performed as a duo called Fordy. He works in publishing and every day he thanks a higher power that, even though he’s forty, he’s still younger than me.
Fred’s 2017 video moved me because 2017 contained some heavy stuff for him and yet here it is, documented a second at a time. So, I wanted to talk to Fred about it. I wanted to talk about his process and how he started. Given that I’ve set out to blog every day this year, I wanted to get his thoughts on doing something every day even when you don’t feel like it.
I interviewed Fred over email because, even though we see each other twice a week, I ain’t gonna transcribe nothin’.
What prompted you to start doing this?
I work in book publishing and my job involves content innovation, looking for new revenue sources, and generally trying to stay on top of trends in the digital space. I spend a lot of time on Reddit, techcrunch, and Twitter to see what people are talking about and what platforms I should check out and experiment with. Back in 2013, my team had been talking about the lack of video content in the book industry and how rare it is for video to get made, even for marketing purposes, in the publishing industry. In the course of looking at video-creation platforms we might leverage, my coworker, Chris Mitchell, found this mobile app called One Second Everyday. I have a bit of OCD and was immediately fascinated by the concept of taking and retaining a one second video each day of your life and have kept with it ever since.
How do you put it together? Are you constantly downloading videos from your iPhone? What editing software do you use?
So the mobile app takes care of the baseline editing for me. Once, you’ve recorded a video, it’ll replay in the app and you can trim up to two seconds of content from it. Then, you can edit together or “mash” seconds for any given date range you want. I typically mash seconds a month at a time and save them on my Google Drive account. I use Google Photos for storage in order to keep from filling up my iPhone with tons of video content. Basically, I back everything up on Google, then delete the native video file from my phone. Then, if I have forgotten to edit my one second, I just download the video from Drive back to my phone. Beyond that I use iMovie to add titles, credits, and the score to my 365-day video at the end of the year.
Do you have any criteria for choosing the soundtrack?
There’s two things that take precedence—(1) is the track long enough to cover the full 7–8 min final film and (2) does it have a beat that compliments lots of one-second edits? I generally fail in finding the former and end up choosing two different songs for the soundtrack, but got lucky this year when I heard De Lux’s Better at Making Time just about a month ago for the first time. I’m pretty sensitive to the fact that most people aren’t gonna watch anything longer than 30 seconds on YouTube, so I try to pick a soundtrack that’s got a pretty defined bassline which I personally find compelling and endlessly danceable. In previous years, I’ve used Fever by The Black Keys, My Number by Foals, You Only Live Twice by The Strokes, and Cream on Chrome by Ratatat. But I probably consider 20–30 different songs before I make a final decision.
Have you ever seen those videos of, like, The Big Lebowski or Scarface and it’s just the fucks from the movie? Those kind of accurately represent the entire arc of the movie in a weird way. How accurately do your seconds represent your life?
Yeah for sure. I think trailers do a similar thing that sometimes backfires. I remember seeing the trailer for Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars and thinking, “This is gonna be the best film since Star Wars.” Then after watching the film, I felt manipulated by a trailer that not only had all the best scenes in it, but clearly didn’t reflect the final film. God that film is garbage.
You know, the first year I finished a compilation and posted it to my YouTube channel, I put a description on the video saying something like, “This proves how much more interesting your life is when it’s set to music.” Because most days, I’m not thinking at all about this project. It’s just really whatever’s in front of me. You’ll notice in these clips that almost every Wednesday is a clip from Megawatt and that was the case even before I was on a house team. I mean, for the past five years, most Wednesday nights, you’re gonna find me at the Magnet so it makes sense that you’re gonna see lots of videos of that theater and it’s performers since that’s what’s right in front of me.
I really look forward to traveling and generally being more active because I wanna have unique experiences to capture on video. That’s not to say I only choose to hang out so I can get a sweet shot for my compilation, but in some unexpected way, this project has had the effect of making me less of a homebody. It’s important to me to not only capture cool locations or images, but also people. Somehow Derrence Washington didn’t make the cut at all this year, which is insane given how much he’s a part of my life. Same with my friend Erin Dow, who’s a part of my extended family and who I see, along with her wife and two children, all the time. I’ve already started thinking that I wanna capture both of them a lot in the 2018 compilation.
There are still plenty of clips of my cats on days when I’m lazy, sick, forgetful, antisocial, or just plain unmotivated. Everyone’s gonna have a case of the Mondays at some point.
How often do you forget to take a video?
Oh God, all the friggin’ time. The app gives you a little bit of a buffer, allowing you to capture a video up until 1am I believe and still have it count as a video taken the previous day. There will be plenty of days though where I had a long, stressful day at work, or I’m generally not feeling creative and it’ll just slip my mind. Interestingly enough, there’s a lot of consistency with missed videos. I used to go almost every Tuesday without remembering to take a video. I think that’s because Tuesday used to be a night where I took a break from comedy and was also my rest day from training for the NYC marathon. There’s only so many one second videos you wanna get of a TV screen, so even if I remember, “Hey, you need a video,” I might just pass if I’m just sitting on the couch. Or i might capture a video of whatever Netflix show I’m watching or where I am in Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Switch.
You lost your sister Angela at the beginning of 2017 and the seconds of those days are in the video. What was it like to shoot that? Then what was it like to revisit that footage?
As I went back and started editing, I purposely started from the end of the year and worked my way back. Then, when I got to January, I put the app down and didn’t edit, probably for a month. I knew all that footage was in there, multiple videos for each day, and I didn’t want to relive the final moments of my sister’s life. For the viewer, it’s tiny snapshots of an individual day’s events, but for me, it brought back everything about Florida Hospital—Orlando’s intensive care unit—the sounds, the smell, the uncomfortable chairs, and the utter helplessness and despair I felt that month.
My last interaction with Angie is captured in this video and it’s something that won’t stand out to anyone, not even my wife. Neither my sister nor I are in the shot; it’s just a scribble of handwritten text. No one else has context for that note but me. It’s heartbreaking to see video of the last words she ever said to me. But at the same time, as time goes by, I see this note as a reflection of my sister’s spirit—spitfire, opinionated, demanding, uncouth, and confidant. Those are the qualities that used to drive me nuts about Angie, but now I miss them the most.
I also wanna point out that I’m not religious at all. But I very much respect anyone that finds solace or meaning in organized religion. When they called the pastor to come perform the Sacrament of Last Rites, I was in the room with my mom, my aunt, my wife, and my brother in law. It was a rare moment of peace and tranquility and I’m glad I caught that on video and decided to put it into the final cut. Angie was much more religious than I am and I think she’d feel good that I got a blessing over her as she cast off that shell and became one with the heavens. And I didn’t give a shit if it was inappropriate to take video in that moment. It was insanely real to me and I made a conscious choice to document it and I’m glad I did.
Is there anything where you think, “This is the second for today”?
I just got back from visiting my friend Jaimy in Colorado and there were tons of moments where I thought, “oh this landscape is gonna be a great one second.” But then later when we were at a bourbon distillery I thought the same thing. It really depends on the day and the location. There’s a shot in here with James Kuo, Sarah Poirier, and Justin Anderson dancing with a white background. That was in this weird elevator at the Alamo Drafthouse building in Brooklyn. When we got in there, my damn phone wouldn’t turn on and I’m pretty sure I made them all ride that elevator twice, cause I really wanted to get a shot in that location. For me, the combination of cool location coupled with cool people equals a perfect opportunity for a one second video.
Conversely are you ever like, “Today’s boring, I’ve got nothing”?
Yeah, there are plenty of days where I’ve just got nothing going on or don’t feel motivated to do anything. You’ll find lots of clips of my cats HM and Snows on those days. But also, I’ll just look around and try to find art. What is it about this crosswalk that’s interesting? Is it interesting to just get a shot of my feet walking through the crosswalk? What about a blurry, panning shot of a random location? Hey, here comes the F train into the station. I can get a video of its sorry ass. There’s always something, you just have to look for it.
What was it like seeing Al Franken? It was probably cool when you took it but then after last year, I bet that changed.
I was really nervous about meeting with him. He was a hero of mine both comedically and politically and I was lucky enough to work for the publisher who made his book. We decided to make an Alexa skill for Amazon which would deliver small, 60-second chunks of content from his book to people who enabled the application for their Alexa-device. We had him come into the office and record intro and outro text that we wrapped around those clips from his audiobook. I was directing him in the recording booth and decided to take a covert video of him in there, which sorta looks crappy. I wrote a ton of funny stuff for those intros/outros that I was really proud of all of which was cut. Al’s a funny guy and he knows it and is very locked in his ways about how he creates content and how he communicates with others. But the Alexa Skill was an insanely cool experience, Amazon loved it and was going to heavily merchandize it on Amazon.com, and we were ready to see book sales take off again.
Now this is gonna sound like hyperbole, but it’s the honest to God’s truth. The day…the literal day!…we were delivering the final Skill over to Amazon for publication on Alexa, I decided to take a quick 10 minute break around 10am. I went on Twitter and saw that the top trend for the day was “Al Franken.” Immediately I thought of a few things—(1) this is insanely good timing because something is going down with Jeff Sessions and it’s probably related to the line of questioning from Senator Franken during his confirmation for Attorney General, which we have in our Alexa skill and can push right away (2) whatever it is, it’s perfectly timed for our Alexa Skill release, or (3) is it at all possible that Amazon flipped the switch early and people are already talking about the Alexa skill?!? Then, well, you know the rest. Twelve weeks of work down the drain in a single moment. It’s probably the most crestfallen I’ve ever felt in my professional career. We still are recovering from it and, truthfully, it’s changed the way my team goes about project selection. We’re now much more focused on smaller experiments instead of ad hoc programs, which is probably smarter in the long run.
Do you ever feel like abandoning the project? Do you feel like you have momentum now?
When I started, I thought this was interesting and fun and had no expectations at all. Now, I feel like this is something I’m just gonna keep doing. There are definitely days when my depression kicks in, or I’ll miss a few days in a row, or I’ll be disinterested in what’s in front of me but that seems to subside the moment I’m back with friends, with my wife Chris, or am active again. This project has helped me remember so many tiny moments that over time would’ve been lost to the waste bin of memory. For me, if I feel like I’m in a low point and I wanna stop, it’s kinda of a wakeup call to get moving, get together with friends, go see a show, enjoy NYC, go for a run, watch the sunrise or sunset, or eat a bizarre food. Just live again.
You can see Fred improvise every Wednesday at the Magnet Theater with his improve team Sexy Baby and check out his long-running indie team Lack Lobster.
