A Star is Born

It Started with a Picture

It all started with a picture. Well, twelve, to be exact. Our friends Suzi and Melissa have a framed set of monthly pictures of their daughter Jett from birth through one-year-old. “Hmm, yes. I’ll have to do that with Lex.”

When we got home from the hospital after he was born, we took our time getting into the groove of being new, sleep-deprived parents, but we also prepared. I printed out month abbreviations (Jan, Feb, Mar, &c) and two sets of numbers (0–9) in 250pt Helvetica. I also made a Week, a Month, and a Year.

We decided to document his first year in regular photos. Every day, we’d take the day’s date. Every Wednesday, we’d take a weekly photo. On the 30th of every month (or the last day of February), we’d take a monthly photo.

We’d take them no matter where we were, no matter what else was going on. When we visited family in Florida and took a side trip to Key West and forgot the numbers and months in Boynton Beach, I hand drew Oct and a few dates to get us through. Those numbers and months have been to Indiana, Florida, Vermont, and the Bahamas.

The Collection

We diligently tagged and sorted and arranged and uploaded the best using Aperture and FlickrExport, by ConnectedFlow. Flickr itself has (had?) no means to create a dynamic set based on tags, so I used dopiaza’s set generator to arrange Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and even Yearly sets by tag.

Once his first birthday came and went, and pictures were uploaded and the sets regenerated, I decided to make it into a little movie. iMovie integrates nicely with iPhoto and Aperture, but it doesn’t respect the sort order of any albums you might select (smart or otherwise). When I pulled in the one-per-day smart album I created, iMovie sorted by image name, which was useless as the pictures were taken with two different bodies and two different cards. So I exported them all, and imported them from the Finder. 359 photos goes into two minutes twenty-two seconds^[1] at about 0.39 seconds per photo. I added some titles and an end card, and boom, had something nice for the family to gaze at.

So, I tweeted it, and I blogged it, and I updated my Facebook status with it, and I sent an email to my family (who don’t all do RSS, or Twitter). After that, I had a bourbon and relaxed.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen thousand page views.

Saturday came, and I saw that my friend Jesús, a contributing editor at Gizmodo, updated his Facebook status to report that he just posted it. I was pretty excited so see how this would turn out. Wow, a couple hundred hits. A thousand. Five. I better tell Amber.

We started flipping back and forth between Gizmodo and YouTube. Both were generating comments. Most were appreciative. A few focused on and criticized the Election Day photo where we included an Obama-branded Vote sticker. Fifteen thousand. Twenty. Thirty. Our son was skirting Internet fame.

My dad had had trouble viewing the movie when I first sent out the link. I then got a followup email: “How in the hell did the “one year of Lex” which was posted 2 weeks [sic, actually days] ago, get so many views (35,000+)?” Good question, dad.

This morning, after the Gizmodo push, I got a request to do a short interview for AOL’s ParentDish site. The story went live this afternoon. Later on, we were contacted by some television folks about broadcasting the clip.

Since then, we’ve been following it on tweetmeme, wikio, and buzzfeed. Who knows where it will go from here?

As I go to bed now, between Gizmodo and YouTube, the video has had over 100,000 views^[3].

Updates

• [8/11] Made AOL’s homepage. (Snapshot)
• [8/12] 430k views on YouTube. Had a radio interview with Mix 1037.