Lifelogging movie mania!
“I’ve never seen time flow in this way before.” -Hunter Bliss (Narrative Clip user)
When you start engaging in some form of lifelogging, you would probably feel the same way as Hunter Bliss does. And if you haven’t, here’s one film recommendation for you to look at time the way Hunter sees it. Here’s introducing Boyhood, a 2014 American drama film written, co-produced and directed by Richard Linklater, who also directed other well-loved films like School of Rock, Before Sunrise (and its two other sequels Before Sunset and Before Midnight), as well as Slacker. Boyhood allows its audience to see time flowing in a different way because it was filmed over 12 years using the exact same cast, where it explores the life of a young boy named Mason as he transits from a young boy to a full-grown teenager amidst various familial issues. The narrative of these 12 years were strung together so beautifully and smoothly that you might not even realise that a year had gone by. Like this blogger says, “Linklater strings these ordinary moments together like Christmas lights to make an entrancing portrait of life.” And don’t worry, for the sake of our limited time on Earth, Linklater has kindly fast forwarded these 12 years into an absolutely brilliant 165-minute film to watch lead actor Ellar Coltrane grow up. Did we also mention that they attained a rating of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.9 on IMDb?
Image credited to Boyhood
Read more: Boyhood review – one of the great films of the decade and Great Ocean Road Timelapse with the Narrative Clip
7 years a selfie
Think 12 years squeezed into 165 minutes is just too much to handle? One young man certainly wanted to challenge that, and is showing us how he has redefined perseverance and discipline in his own visual lifelogs. Taking a selfie every day even well before selfies had their own hashtag, Hugo Cornellier decides that he will take a selfie every day to document his boyhood from 12 to 19 years old. Yes, that’s 7 years, or 2555 selfies. As it seems, Hugo has successfully documented the many changes in his life through this project – from gaining his chiseled jaw and moving house to making new friends and girlfriends. While he might have thought that he had chosen the best age range for this project to showcase how changes were most prominent and rapid then, others playfully commented that they noticed this one constant – he never smiled during these 7 years, growing up. Whether he smiled or not in those 7 years, our guess is that he’s now pretty stoked with the 3.7 million Youtube views that he’s gotten. Perhaps he’s still collecting his stash of selfies to show the world one day. Stay tuned!
Read more: Time-Lapse: Incredibly Dedicated Teen Takes One Selfie Per Day for 7 Years
Video credited to Hugo Cornellier
Enter into North Korea
Undoubtedly, technology has fast-forwarded our lives in so many ways. Things that we used to take hours to complete now only require 15 minutes of our time. In fact, the very reason that Boyhood or 7 years a selfie can be completed is because of the existence of so much film technology and image preservation techniques. So imagine a life without that kind of technology, which is often facilitated by the exchange of ideas across borders – a privilege that countries like North Korea might not have enjoyed since 1948. Since David Guttenfelder, one of the first foreign photographers to be granted the ability to work in North Korea and who was subsequently awarded TIME’s Instagram photographer of the year, not much were seen or heard of this land of whispers until two photographers JT Singh and Rob Whitworth debuted their “Enter Pyongyang” flow-motion hyperlapse video a week back. Through this video, Singh and Whitworth wanted to capture the essence of how North Korea was gradually opening up and its resulting dynamism and potential as they welcomed numerous special economic zones with China, Russia and South Korea. Could it be true that this hyperlapse video is giving us a glimpse of how fast-changing and forward-looking North Korea could be in the coming years?
Read more: First-person Hyperlapse Videos and Disney tech auto-edits your raw footage into watchable video
Video credited to JT Singh
One World Trade Center
And if there’s one place in this world that could encompass the true meaning of life in fast forward, many would probably agree that Manhattan takes the title home. In the video above, photographer Benjamin Rosamond managed to get front row seats for witnessing the return of the lower Manhattan skyline, achieved by the rebuilding of 1 World Trade Center. This skyscraper boasts reaching 1776 feet and is now the tallest building in the United States. As Benjamin reveals to Popsugar about the beauty of time-lapse videos, he mentions that “It shows progress that is not visibly obvious to the naked eye… it highlights the changes that happen too slowly to notice in real time.” Have you hit the << button on your life to notice the gradual changes in your naturally occurring fast-forwarded life?
Read more: This week in lifelogging: best use of time-lapse moments
Video credited to Benjamin Rosamond Photography
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