PARK CITY, Utah -- Imagine this scene: "The award for Best Documentary goes to: Life in a Day." And 333 directors file onto the stage.
The most elaborate crowdsourced arts project in history, YouTube's surprisingly satisfying, sometimes thrilling Life in a Day draws from a huge pot of source material: 80,000 slice-of-life videos, comprising more than 4,500 hours of video, all shot on July 24, 2010. A team led by producer Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald (Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) edited the choice bits into a 90-minute feature film.
While Life in a Day might seem like an expensive corporate stunt, the final product is a groundbreaking piece of cinematic assemblage. The film premieres Thursday night at the Sundance Film Festival and on YouTube, with a possible theatrical release later in 2011.
The project unfolded like this: Users from around the world uploaded whatever they wanted -- "a sunrise, the commute to work, a neighborhood soccer match," the website proposed. Macdonald and editor Joe Walker created a media-management system and set 23 assistant editors combing through the material, grading it and sorting it by keyword. Macdonald and Walker then watched the best 250 hours, and recombined their favorite material into loosely organized segments.
Knowing where the content came from -- users from 120 countries shot footage on cellphones, consumer cameras and webcams -- makes Life in a Day feel like an entirely new form of storytelling.
Macdonald, Walker and the team clearly put in a beyond-the-call-of-duty effort, transmuting what could have been a nifty YouTube gimmick into a powerful collage of scenes.
The movie is provocative, gorgeous and at times deeply moving; the press and industry screening I attended was filled with gasps and sniffles. These typically reticent professionals broke out into applause at the film's end.
Despite its disparate elements, the film retains a coherence, moving confidently from sequence to sequence. Walker built a collage of food and eating scenes around a song sung by African women as they pound grain into flour. A raucous celebration at the Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany, turns tragic (July 24 was the day 21 revelers died in a stampede). Backlit, grainy confessionals and shout-outs to God mingle with wild, professionally shot HD footage.
The movie also showcases thrilling innovations: One skydiver videoing another thousands of feet above the earth, an acrobat cam on a fearless young girl, a diver's eye view of an approaching pool from the highest platform.
Rather than charting physical landscapes like the typical travelogue, Macdonald and his team prove expert at revealing emotional environments. Life in a Day covers heartbreak, marriage, war, confusion and love both unrequited and fulfilled -- it is more like a glimpse inside a world of diaries than a National Geographic program.
And Life is unafraid of death, featuring several poignant sequences exploring our mortality. Without playing spoiler, one fish-eyed sequence, shot by a Japanese father, represents the most powerful three minutes of cinema I've seen at Sundance 2011.
WIRED Imagine what else pro filmmakers might do with crowdsourced footage.
TIRED Funding alt.cinema as an exercise in branding.
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