A U.K. father didn't want to miss a single moment of his son's first year of life, so he recorded video every day from birth to his first birthday -- then edited one-second snippets together into a short film that captures it all.
You can watch Indigo Cromwell go from a just-seconds-old newborn still in the hospital last July, to a cute and precocious toddler crawling across the grass, having tantrums, even taking his first few steps in a frantic run from mom to dad.
In the final clip, Indigo is shown placing a candle in his first birthday cake.
The YouTube video has now garnered hundreds of thousands of views, something Sam Cromwell, the 32-year-old London-based father and photographer who made the film, said he wasn't expecting.
"I posted it for my friends and family and the site picked it up and ran with it and it went up and up," Cromwell told CTV's Canada AM.
"I didn't think a lot of people would get it because it's not their family, but it seemed to strike a chord with a lot of different people."
As a doting father, Sam said it wasn't easy to choose just one second of video from each day -- to him it was all precious footage. But over the course of about a month of working on the project on evenings and weekends, he was able to pare the hours of footage down to the key moments that eventually comprised the video.
When he showed it to his wife, also a photographer and the subject of many of the clips, he immediately knew all the effort was worthwhile.
"She cried and cried and cried, tears all over the place. I felt like my job was done," Sam said.
The video has elicited a similar response from many complete strangers who watched the video and were touched by the simple narrative.
"Love! Love! Love this video. What a brilliant idea and what an amazing keepsake of your lovely son. Thank you for sharing," said one viewer.
Another commented: "It feels like it goes that quick. You blink and they're in 5th grade. Crazy."
The couple, who fittingly met through the photo-sharing side Flickr, haven't yet decided whether to document Indigo's second year in the same way, but said they are still shooting lots of video and will have the material to do so, if they wish.
They also haven't decided when to show the video to their son.
"We're talking about it and wondering if we should show him now, show him straight away and let him grow up with it, or wait and surprise him."
