When Simone was pregnant with Ruby in 2006-2007, I saw the short film “Me” in which a girl took a picture of herself every day for three years and set it to music in a rapid time-lapse sort of way. I thought it was pretty cool at the time, and there have since been many imitators online doing similar projects, but one thing I thought about was how she really didn’t change that much over three years. She pretty much looked the same at the beginning and the end. But what if you did this with a baby?
I decided to take a picture of Ruby every day, and to try and put together some sort of video which would show an awesome time-lapse progression of a child aging from birth to a year old in mere minutes. This was clearly destined for not working. The problem was not with my resolve, or with my dedication. I actually did take a picture of Ruby every day for a year. What I ran into as I tried to put the video together, was more of a problem with my model.
The girl in the original video took a picture of herself standing in the same spot, with the same expression, every single day, so there was a definite flow to the very similar images. But try telling that to a baby. Some days I could only get a good shot of her sleeping. Some days she would look left, some days right, and other days she would attempt to be as blurry as possible. She did not, at that point, speak English, so it was very hard to communicate my vision to her.
Finally, I altered my vision, and decided to just do a cool montage of Ruby pictures, set to songs about Ruby. I am reminded of this project now, as I attempt to put together a similar video for Edward, and as it will be another 4 or 5 months until that one is done, I will leave you with Ruby’s video. Warning: it’s kind of long and contains 367 cute pictures of Ruby, so don’t feel obliged to watch it, but for those of you who like that sort of thing (Hi Mom), here it is.