Life in a Day back where it began

Last year Hollywood-filmmakers Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald joined forces with YouTube and started a film experiment that saw the whole world collaborate and create a documentary we can proudly say is ‘ours’. As of today the film is back where it began; the internet.

If anything, crowdsourced documentaries are a incredible test for an editor. Made from no less than 80.000 uploaded videos from YouTube, offering 4.500 hours of footage, the final film, Life in a Day, only lasted 1.5 hour when finished.

But the two filmmakers were not the first to come up with the idea, as this article in the NY Times will explain. They merely beat their competitors (who were working on their project One day on Earth) with the help and huge backing of Google’s YouTube. Nevertheless, the project became a symbol for crowdsourcing at its best.

Quest for footage

Scott and MacDonald called upon people worldwide to send in a short clip of a moment in their daily lives on 24 July 2010. Eventually the received footage from over 192 countries.

The ‘socio-cinema’ documentary (which sounds much posher than crowdsourced) premiered at the Sundance Festival last January and toured the world after.

People who saw their footage being used got credited as co-directors and a few collaborators even got to be at the premiere.

There’s more than this

As explained in two earlier posts, here and here, there are a few similar projects around later this month (surely you can remember 11.11.11, can’t you?) and we would like to see you participate in these as well. But for now, just relax, sit back and watch Life in a Day here via YouTube.