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.

February 2025

Month 2 of my challenge to shoot a short video every day and turning it into a video. I'm making these videos just for me. It will be fun to look back on them in the future.

I'm still trying to figure out this format. I like idea of turning the videos from my phone into a video journal. I'm not particularly good at remembering to take videos during the most interesting moments of the day but hopefully that will become more of a habit.

February was the month that I finally decided it was time to shed a few pounds. I started tracking my weight for 8 weeks and lost about 13 pounds during the month. My goal is to no longer be 'obese' according to the BMI statistics at the end of the 8 weeks. Recording my progress means that failure is not an option.

The month was mostly dedicated to getting our home listed for sale. I shot some nice photos and videos at the end of the month. You'll see those appear in the next video.

March 2025

In March, I tried but failed to take some video every day. But I got pretty close. Like memories, some days are filled with unique activities, other days are utterly forgettable. In March I decided to just take a quick video of what was interesting and create a 'month in the life' recap video from whatever footage I ended up with at the end of the month. This video is about 10 minutes, which is significantly longer than January and February's videos. I'm not sorry. I think its an interesting recap of the month.

March was actually a pretty eventful month. We had lunch with our friends Alex and Jennifer, held a couple open houses to sell our home, went on a winery tour with the Clarks (David's brother's family), had a number of Magic Duel performances, created a couple websites, and travelled to Holland, Michigan to catch up with Matt the Knife and Emily and celebrate my aunt Sandy's 90th birthday.

April 2025

I didn't film very much in April, but the little footage I did get turned into a short and punchy video.

After selling our home in March, April was all about cleaning, organizing and getting rid of all our extra stuff. Spring sprung hard in Greenbelt, Maryland. I worked on updating a few web sites. David finished up his final design projects before officially retiring at the end of the month. I had a birthday and performed at the Magic Duel. And we managed to spend some time with friends and family. The month flew by.

May 2025

May was a big month. So I ended up with a big video. My editing skills are getting better, but this video took days to edit. There was a lot of footage to go through and editing photos of the trip to Greece took a while to figure out. I'm hoping that I am learning to be more efficient so I can get through future videos in an evening or two. I'm proud of how it came out though. I think it captures the events of our lives pretty well.

We started May with a trip to New York to celebrate David's official retirement and Gail's birthday. David and Gail continued on to Greece for a week. I ended my long run performing in The Magic Duel. We sold our house, packed up our stuff and moved to Michigan in time to celebrate Memorial Day weekend with family.

June 2025

June kicked off with a graduation party for my niece Reese, then I traveled to Charlotte, NC for the Psychic Entertainer's Association annual 'Meeting of the Minds'. The rest of the month was spent settled into life on the beach of Lake Huron with my mother and family. Life took on a slower pace in June and summer weather was slow to arrive. I think that when I rewatch this video in the future I'll be grateful for having captured some of the little moments that made up our lives in June of 2025.

These videos consist almost entirely of footage shot on my Pixel 8 phone. For the most part I'm happy with the look and quality. The front camera video looks like crap, especially in low light. In good lighting the back camera is pretty great, although I'm starting to wish that I had higher quality footage at times. Next year I may need to use my bigger cameras more. I'm also not trying to capture any audio, but I can imagine that I will eventually start narrating more in these clips.

This challenge has definitely helped me learn video editing. Each month brings a new set of challenges to figure out and I think the videos continue to improve. The posted video has several rough spots that could be improved but overall I'm happy with my progress. There's no time for perfectionism. I need to move on to the next video as I'm falling behind.

I edit these videos over several days. One day to compile all the raw footage from the month on a timeline, a second day to edit it down into something watchable, a third day to add music, titles, etc. and a fourth day for final edits, exports, and uploading. It's a commitment, but I am getting faster as my process develops over time and every video has seen improvements in quality. Last month I switched to HDR uploads. This month is all about improving the music.

This 15 minute video uses 19 different pieces of music. Finding good, royalty free music is really hard and time consuming. This month, for the first time, I tried creating AI music. My life is forever changed. The video opens with a custom song for Reese's graduation party (it's pretty good!) and half of the other songs in the video were also AI generated. I'll let you try to figure out which are which. Creating custom music with the right tone and tempo was so much faster than digging through music libraries trying to find something that fits. Plus there are no copyright issues which is a HUGE deal on YouTube. I'm super excited about the possibilites. AI music will absolutely improve the quality of my future videos.

July 2025

Between my niece Easton's birthday on July 3rd and the 4th of July celebration, the month had an exciting start. My brother Peter and his family were living at the cabin most of the month as were my brother David and sister Lisa at their cabins near by. The month was filled with family time and friends visiting. The month ended with our traveling to Chicago with our dogs to catch a flight to Madrid.

I really like July's video. When I started this challenge I don't think I imagined that I would be creating half-hour videos every month, but I have been letting these videos figure out what they're trying to be. Every month I shoot a different amount of video and each time I edit a video it gets a little more sophisticated. This months video is 27 minutes long. I think it does a great job of telling the story of our month living at the beach with my family. This is the first video with 100% original music. I think it's my best video yet.