A selfie a day for 8.5 years: Concordian Hugo Cornellier's YouTube video goes viral
The numbers are in and they’re huge.
To date, Hugo Cornellier’s time-lapse videos have had more than 10 million views on YouTube.
The 20-year-old Concordia student has taken a selfie every day since 2008, when he was still a boy, long before the term “selfie” even existed. Last Wednesday, he posted a third update to his video collection, Hugo Takes a Selfie — two minutes and five seconds long at 16 frames per second. It received 400,000 views in the first 24 hours.
His big break
“My video first exploded after the movie Boyhood came out in August 2014, when I originally posted it. It was good timing,” says Cornellier, a mechanical engineering student. “I’d posted it on Reddit and it got reposted and reposted. Today, I’m talking to the BBC!”
As a 12-year-old, Cornellier saw YouTube sensation Noah Kalina’s early selfie video, chronicling six years, and was inspired.
“But Noah was an adult,” says Cornellier. “I wanted to show aging and growth.”
He delivers. The video shows Cornellier’s progression through puberty, showcasing an array of looks, from mohawks and buzz cuts to his first beard. We see him in Cuba and in a Santa hat. We see his first girlfriend and his first apartment.
More eye contact
“The recent update to the video takes it to another level because I stabilized each photo, so my eyes are aligned. And I added some captions. It has more impact,” explains Cornellier.
He is still taking daily selfies and will continue with the project. It’s just a hobby, he insists, and he has no plans to become a professional photographer or filmmaker.
“My friends think it’s so cool and my mom, especially, loves it,” he says. “She reads The Daily Mail every day and she was so excited when she saw this article about me.”
Check out the latest version of Cornellier’s YouTube hit, Hugo Takes a Selfie:
