English Italian Japanese German Spanish Indonesian Balinese Portuguese Ukrainian Vietnamese Creole Catalan Dutch Bengali Masai Hindi Arabic Quechua Russian Telugu Tamil
Life in a Day is a crowd-sourceddocumentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, 24 July 2010.
The film is 94 minutes 53 seconds long[1] and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations.[3][4] The completed film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on 27 January 2011[5][6] and the premiere was streamed live on YouTube.[7] On 31 October 2011, YouTube announced that Life in a Day would be available for viewing on its website free of charge, and on DVD.[8][9]
The film was the creation of a partnership among YouTube, Ridley Scott Associates and LG electronics, announced on 6 July 2010. Users sent in videos supposed to be recorded on 24 July 2010, and then Ridley Scott produced the film and edited the videos into a film with Kevin Macdonald and film editor Joe Walker, consisting of footage from some of the contributors. All chosen footage authors are credited as co-directors.[13]
The film's music was written by composer and producer Harry Gregson-Williams, along with Matthew Herbert. The film's opening song, written by Herbert, was performed by English singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding.[14] The film also features the song "Jerusalem" by Kieran Leonard[15] and "Future Prospect" by Biggi Hilmars.
Macdonald told The Wall Street Journal that the project was initially conceived as a way to commemorate the fifth birthday of YouTube, and that he wanted to "take the humble YouTube video, ... and elevate it into art."[16] Editor Joe Walker said that as he understood it, the concept for the crowd-sourced documentary came from Ridley Scott's production company "Scott Free U.K." and from YouTube, while Macdonald explained more specifically that "the inspiration for me was a British group from the 1930s called the Mass Observation movement. They asked hundreds of people all over Britain to write diaries recording the details of their lives on one day a month and answer a few simple questions. ... These diaries were then organised into books and articles with the intention of giving voice to people who weren't part of the "elite" and to show the intricacy and strangeness of the seemingly mundane."[17]
Macdonald began his "Around the world in 80,000 clips" article in The Guardian by posing the questions, "What do you love? What do you fear? What's in your pocket?" and explaining that "one day last summer, I asked ordinary people around the world to answer those three questions and spend a day filming their lives."[18] The 80,000 individual clips received amounted to 4,500 hours of electronic footage.[17] Macdonald explained that about 75% of the film's content came from people contacted through YouTube, traditional advertising, TV shows, and newspapers; the remaining 25% came from cameras sent out to the developing world, Macdonald pointing out "It was important to represent the whole world."[16] At a reported cost of £40,000,[18] "we did resort to snail mail for sending out 400 cameras to parts of the developing world – and getting back the resulting video cards."[17] Macdonald later remarked that he regretted not sending out a far smaller number of cameras but providing training in camera operation and desired type of content: "Naively, I hadn't realised how alien, not only the concept of a documentary is to a lot of people (in the developing world), but also the idea that your own opinions are worth sharing."[18]
Macdonald expressed to The Wall Street Journal that the film "could only be made in the last five years because ... you can get enough people who will have an understanding of how to shoot something."[16] Walker told Wired magazine's Angela Watercutter that the film "couldn't have been made without technology. Ten years ago it would've been impossible."[17] Macdonald explained that YouTube "allowed us to tap into a pre-existing community of people around the world and to have a means of distributing information about the film and then receiving people's 'dailies'. It just wouldn't have been organizationally or financially feasible to undertake this kind of project pre-YouTube."[17]
The filmmaking team "used YouTube's ability to collect all of this material and then we had this sort of sweatshop of people, all multilingual film students, to sift through this material. It couldn't have been done any other way. Nobody had ever done a film like this before, so we had to sort of make it up as we went along."[17] "To put (the 4500 hours of raw footage) in context, I just cut a feature film for Steve McQueen and there's 21 hours of [film] for that."[17]
Walker, whose team edited the whole film over seven weeks, remarked to Adam Sternbergh of The New York Times that "The analogy is like being told to make Salisbury Cathedral, and then being introduced to a field full of rubble. You have to start looking for buttresses and things that connect together."[19] Walker indicated that a team of roughly two dozen researchers, chosen both for a cinematic eye and proficiency with languages, watched, logged, tagged, and rated each clip on a scale of one to five stars.[19] Walker remarked that "the vast amount of material was two stars", and that he and director Kevin Macdonald reviewed the four-star and five-star rated clips.[19]
In addition to the star rating system, the editing/selecting team also organised the 80,000 clips according to countries, themes and video quality as part of the selection process, and further had to convert from 60 different frame rates to make the result cinematically acceptable. All the logging and researching was done using the QuantumCatDV media asset management software.[17][20]
Themes and content
Macdonald said that the film focused on a single day "because a day is the basic temporal building block of human life—wherever you are," with Walker adding that the particular day, 24 July 2010, was chosen because it was the first Saturday after the World Cup.[17]
Concerning the chronology of the film and the order of the clips, Macdonald explained that he let the 300 hours of "best bits" tell him what the themes and structure of the film should be, likening the material to a Rorschach test—"you will see in it what you want to see in it."[17] Joe Walker further explained that "We always wanted to have a number of structures, so it's not just midnight to midnight, but it's also from light to dark and from birth to death. ... bashing things together and making them resonate against each other and provoking thought."[17]
Macdonald said he saw the movie "as a metaphor of the experience of being on the Internet. ... clicking from one place to another, in this almost random way…following our own thoughts, following narrative and thematic paths."[16] Betsy Sharkey wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "this fast-paced documentary is shaped as much by Internet savvy as traditional filmmaking, which doesn't make the experience of it any less satisfying, or the implications any less provocative."[21] "The story is told through the voices of the contributors, but mostly it's the images that do the heavy lifting."[21]
Macdonald explained that the film "doesn't have a traditional story or a traditional narrative, but it has thematic movement [and] recurring characters."[16] He praised certain specific contributions, including "the most technically amazing skydiving shot I have ever seen in any film" and "a hand going up to a window pane and picking a fly off and filming the hand walking through the house and letting the fly go—and you see the fly take off in the distance."[16] Asked if there any particular submission crystallised the film's theme, Macdonald cited "the family who had been going through cancer."[16] More generally, Macdonald praised the immediacy that a handycam permits.[16]
Ian Buckwalter of Washingtonian magazine said that "the familiar beats of the day (were) cut together to show that we're actually far more similar than we are different."[22]The Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan similarly noted that "the people whose lives form the spine of Life feel familiar... Their hopes and joys, disappointments and fears are our own."[23] Liz Braun, writing in the Toronto Sun, said that "The overall sense of the project appears to be: It's good to be alive. ... According to the film, there are things that divide us as humans, but far more things that unite us."[24]Toronto Star critic Peter Howell was in accord, observing that the "film shows things (what) billions of us do every day, perhaps thinking that we are somehow alone in our pursuits. Yet we couldn't be more connected."[25] However, The Boston Globe's Tom Russo gave director "Macdonald and crew credit for picking out good, clear, telling contrasts, and not sweating potential heavy-handedness," citing contrasts between "one smug contributor pull[ing] a set of Lamborghini keys from his pocket, ... then mov[ing] on to ragged-looking Third Worlders amusedly scoffing at the idea that they'd have anything in their pockets," and a Westerner "quietly worries about losing his hair, while an older Afghan man quietly worries about getting through the day alive."[26]
Sharkey described the progression of the film: "Beginning with videos that start pre-dawn then moving through morning, afternoon and evening, ... the rituals that define a day begin to emerge. Beyond an extraordinary range of cultures, terrain and styles reflected, which are captivating on their own, the film stands as a stirring reminder of how ordinary and yet eclectic humanity can be. If Life in a Day is any measure, we are a quirky, likeable, unpredictable and yet predictable bunch."[21]
Yumi Goto of TIME LightBox remarked that "the most striking aspect of this documentary is that it's the first crowdsourced, user-generated content to hit the big screen."[27] O'Sullivan said that, being "alternately funny, scary, boring, moving, amateurish and gorgeous, it is a pretty spectacular thing: a crowdsourced movie that manages to feel singular and whole."[23] Anthony Benigno wrote in Filmcritic.com that the film "is pretty much the first social-media movie ever made."[28]
The New York Times' Adam Sternbergh wrote that "the film's most memorable moments are the ones of unexpected intimacy. ... The film aims to tell the story of a planet, but it's the vulnerability of these individual moments, contributed as part of a larger project, that lingers."[19] The Los Angeles Times' Betsy Sharkey wrote that "The fact that we all experienced that day is part of what gives the documentary an unusual kind of relatability."[21]
Sharkey characterised the film as being "the most hopeful yet from Macdonald, a director who's made his reputation by digging into the more corrupted and conflicted side of human nature with One Day in September, his Oscar-winning documentary on the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes... [T]he lightness [Macdonald has] unearthed in Life in a Day has an earthy and at times euphoric appeal."[21]
Reception
Life in a Day has received generally positive reception from film critics. Rotten Tomatoes reports that 82% of 52 critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 7.1 out of 10.[29]Metacritic gave the film a rating average of 58/100, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[30]
Helen O'Hara from Empire stated that the film was "moving and insightful. Not a classic by any means, but a fascinating glimpse of the way we live today."[31] Michael O'Sullivan of the Washington Post gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying that "Life in a Day is, without exaggeration, a profound achievement."[23] Peter Howell, a critic of the Toronto Star, gave the film three out of four stars, saying "the vast majority of the film feels undeniably real and incredibly inspiring."[25]Wired magazine's Angela Watercutter wrote that the film "brims with intimacy and urgency."[17]
CNN's Mark Rabinowitz wrote that the film is "a rousing success of an experiment: quite possibly the first large-scale, global use of the Internet to create meaningful and beautiful art,"[32] with CNN Newsroom'sJosh Levs remarking that the film is "the best time capsule in the history of the world."[33] Ian Buckwalter of Washingtonian called the condensed experiences "breathtaking" and "as riveting as any narrative."[22]
Liz Braun, writing in the Toronto Sun, said that "a lot is predictable" and "It's all familiar for the most part, and it's all mildly interesting," but also cited several "sequences that fully engage a viewer emotionally."[24] Andrew Schenker from Slant Magazine criticised the film by stating: "Only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism that the film celebrates."[34] Contentions such as Schenker's were contradicted by The New York Times' Adam Sternbergh who wrote that "if the knock against the Internet... is that it stokes our collective narcissism, this film, in its best moments, proves the opposite: not a global craving for exposure but a surprising universal willingness to allow ourselves to be exposed."[19]
Though saying Life in a Day "isn't a bad movie" and there are "fits and spurts" in which the film is "actually quite beautiful," "funny" and "moving", Anthony Benigno from Filmcritic.com asserted that documentaries should have a point, narrative, conflict and goal, but called this film "scattershot" and "at its worst, veering closer into exploitation...and even voyeurism."[28] V.A. Musetto, a critic from the New York Post, said about the film: "Judging by the National Geographic doc Life in a Day, a lot of nothing happened on 24 July 2010."[35] A counterpoint was expressed by the Los Angeles Times' Betsy Sharkey: "the world community had a lot of interesting things on its mind, but it still took filmmakers like Macdonald and Walker to help us say it with feeling."[21]
Two writers for The New York Times adopted opposing opinions. Mike Hale's review asserted that "much of the material is interesting in its own right... but... the problem is the resolutely conventional and soft-headed way in which that material has been assembled," and that "the overall tone remains gee-whiz."[36] In contrast, Adam Sternbergh concluded that "the montages of ordinary acts, repeated from Japan to Dubai to Las Vegas, take on a kind of profundity."[19]
Criticism of free labour
The film has been criticised for its use of free labour. In the film industry, the production teams required to produce images and sounds are normally paid. However, in the case of Life in a Day, the labour undertaken by YouTube users to shoot the content used in film was not compensated, even though the film was screened in traditional cinema venues for a profit.[37][38]
List of contributors
All authors of the videos are credited as co-directors.[39]
Baitijrin Alexander Muhammedovic and Ardilanov Renat Valerevich
Pedro Nuno Tavarez Barcelos G. Lobito
Jens Gottschalk
Alex Peacher
Anthony Sheppard
Jose Alderson
Glenn Vivares
Balog Zsofia
Manasvi Kumar
Assan Isa Aldoy
Peter Njogu
Kevin McMahon
John X. Demaio
Logan Needham
Angélique A.E. Georges
Frederik Boje
Raul Rivas
Socrates Cuadri
Alan Teitel
Tom Robinson
Louie Rodríguez
Massoud Hossaini
Stephanie Steenstra
Sherkhan Mateen
Albina
Farzana Wahidy
Timothy A. Conneally
Frederic Lumiere and Jane Haubrich
David Chappelow
M. Dowod Taban
Georgia Merton
Giuseppe Mattia
John Paul Mallo
Natalia Andreadis
Jessica Geltz
Leah Collum
Massomi Sultani
Rachel Hart
Shir Decker
Noorshah Noorani
Alberta Álvarez Portela
Jessie Brisendine
Robin Bordeaux
Esther De Blu
Johanna Nifosi
Natalie Itzkowic
Han Siu
Mojca Breceli
Brad Sorensen
Amy Levandosky
Benjamin Richey
Neil Tuttle
Ina Angelina Foerster
Bernhard Kleine-Frauns
Christopher Farrell
Thorben Winkler
David Peter
Frank De Vries
Iddimus
Christian Dremsa
Mareike Sehr
Marcus Gebauer
Sven Matika
Timo Jenderny
Bjorn Neumann
Daniel Montau
Shankar Karuppayah
Andrew K.
Maike Spieker
Sinan Lafci
Aliriza Guler
Kevin Meister
Erfan Asgari Aragh
Bojan Kekezovic
Jen Kleinhenz
Jobal Ferreira Almeida
Dawud Havard
Sergius Sutanto
Alex Tak Lam Chan
Johannes Dinda
Samuel Cockedey
Bo Kovich
Carry Premiere
Rico Damacen
Marcus Tedenryd
Timothy Stevens
Gabor Kukucska
Alison Segar
Gaby Aguirre Apaza
Susan Harper
Daniel Mas Castane
Shahin Najafipour
Alan John Smith
Marx Succes jr
Ashley B. Fisher
Erick Henning
Nakagawa Kazuhiko
Joaquin Granados Ortega
Neil Fisher
Sean Charles Denny
Igor Lymar
Anna Vakhotska
Ermete Ricci
Sara Isabel Amorim Marinho
Satoshi Onabuchi
Betsy DelValley
Tomasz Skowronski
Dorgas Muller
Joris Mathei
Simone Pessoa
Kittikhun Srisathit
Follow-on projects and legacy
In October 2011, BBC News announced that Britain in a Day would be funded by BBC Learning as part of BBC's "Cultural Olympiad," with the Britain in a Day YouTube channel accepting video contributions from the public about their lives on a specific day: 12 November 2011.[40] Scott oversaw the project with executive producer Macdonald (both from Life in a Day) and director Morgan Mathews.[41]
In 2012 directors Philip Martin and Gaku Narita teamed up to create Japan in a Day which accounts of the aftermath from Japan's devastating tsunami in 2011 featuring YouTube videos shot by survivors living in and near the affected areas.
Macdonald and Scott also created Christmas in a Day (November 2013) a forty-eight-minute YouTube documentary on which a 3.5-minute advertisement for U.K. supermarket Sainsbury's was based.[42] The film constituted crowd-sourced clips recorded on Christmas 2012.[42]
The production house behind Italy in a Day is teaming with Scott Free Productions to produce Israel in a Day, with Germany and France also working on their own versions in the format.[43]
UN in a Day, directed by Rubén Mendoza which count a day (August 24) to all the members of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in celebration of its 150th anniversary. That Movie was released in 2017.
Blade Runner is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on space colonies. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escapes back to Earth, burnt-out cop Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly agrees to hunt them down.
Sir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. He directs films in the science fiction, crime, and historical drama genres, with an atmospheric and highly concentrated visual style. He ranks among the highest-grossing directors and has received many accolades, including the BAFTA Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in 2018, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003, and appointed a Knight Grand Cross by King Charles III in 2024.
Anthony David Leighton Scott was an English filmmaker.
Kevin Glyn Buchanan Macdonald is a Scottish film director. His films include One Day in September (1999), a documentary about the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes, which won him the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the climbing documentary Touching the Void (2003), the drama The Last King of Scotland (2006), the political thriller State of Play (2009), the Bob Marley documentary Marley (2012), the post-apocalyptic drama How I Live Now (2013), the thriller Black Sea (2014), the Whitney Houston documentary Whitney (2018), and the legal drama film The Mauritanian (2021).
Robert Scott Hicks is an Australian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known as the director of Shine, the biopic of pianist David Helfgott. Hicks was nominated for two Academy Awards. Other movies he has directed include the film adaptations of Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis and Nicholas Sparks' The Lucky One.
Alien is a science fiction horror and action media franchise centered on the original film series which depicts warrant officer Ellen Ripley and her battles with an extraterrestrial lifeform, commonly referred to as the Alien ("Xenomorph"), and the prequel series following the exploits of the David 8 android and the aliens referred to as the "Engineers".
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a 2010 romantic action comedy film co-written, produced and directed by Edgar Wright, based on the graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley. It stars an ensemble cast, with Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim, a slacker musician who is trying to win a competition to get a record deal, while also battling the seven evil exes of his new girlfriend Ramona Flowers, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
Andrew John Hansen is an Australian comedian, musician and author, best known for being a member of satirical team The Chaser. As a member of The Chaser, Hansen's television work includes co-writing and starring in ABC Television shows CNNNN (2002–2003), The Chaser Decides, Chaser News Alert (2005), The Chaser's War On Everything, Yes We Canberra! (2010), The Hamster Wheel (2011–12), The Hamster Decides (2013) and The Chaser's Media Circus (2014–2015).
Prometheus is a 2012 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott and written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. It is the fifth installment of the Alien film series and features an ensemble cast including Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green, and Charlize Theron. Set in the late 21st century, the film centers on the crew of the spaceship Prometheus as it follows a star map discovered among the artifacts of several ancient Earth cultures. Seeking the origins of humanity, the crew arrives on a distant world and discovers a threat that could cause the extinction of the human species.
Britain in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary film that consists of a series clips of footage shot by members of the public in Britain on 12 November 2011. Scott Free Films and the BBC produced the film, which was made in conjunction with YouTube.
James D. Rolfe is an American YouTuber, filmmaker, and actor. He is best known for creating and starring in the comedic retrogaming web series Angry Video Game Nerd (2004–present). His spin-off projects include reviews of retro films, television series, and board games. He is considered a pioneer of internet gaming videos and is noted for his widespread influence on YouTube content after the series premiered on the platform in 2006.
Springsteen & I is a 2013 documentary-biographical film directed by Baillie Walsh documenting the life and career of Bruce Springsteen through the eyes and insights of his fans throughout the world.
Joe Walker is a British film editor who has worked in both England and Los Angeles. In 2022, he won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on Dune, having been nominated twice before for 12 Years a Slave and Arrival. For the American Cinema Editors Award for Best Edited Feature Film – Dramatic he has received a string of five nominations over eight years and in 2016 he won, for Arrival. He took the European Film Award for Best Editor for Shame in 2012 and Satellite Award for Best Editing for Sicario in 2016.
Andrea Dalla Costa is an Italian visual artist, art director and film maker.
India in a Day is a crowdsourced, feature-length documentary produced by Scott Free Productions, Phantom Films and Google. The footage featured in the film was submitted by members of the public in India in a single day on 10 October 2015.
Blade Runner is an American cyberpunk media franchise originating from the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, featuring the character of Rick Deckard. The book has been adapted into several media, including films, comics, a stage play, and a radio serial. The first film adaptation was Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott in 1982. Although the film initially underperformed at the American box office, it became a cult classic, and has had a significant influence on science fiction. A novelization and a comic adaptation of the film were released in the same year. From 1995 to 2000, three novels serving as sequels to both Blade Runner and the original novel were written by K. W. Jeter, a friend of Dick's. A film sequel to Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, was released in 2017. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Blade Runner in 2012, a short film was released, and in the lead up to the release of Blade Runner 2049, several more short films detailing events that occurred between 2019 and 2049 were released. The influence of the franchise has helped spawn the cyberpunk subgenre.
Kogonada is a South Korean-born American filmmaker.
Whitney is a 2018 documentary film about the American singer and actress Whitney Houston. The film was directed by Kevin Macdonald and produced by Simon Chinn, Jonathan Chinn and Lisa Erspamer. Whitney was screened out of competition at the world premiere as part of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival on 16 May 2018 with a cinema release on 6 July 2018. The film was also released on home media where it debuted at number one on the UK Official Music Video Chart. The film received positive reviews from critics and audiences and grossed $4.7 million worldwide at the box office. In December 2018, Whitney was nominated at the 61st Grammy Awards for Best Music Film.
Life in a Day 2020 is a 2021 American crowd-sourced documentary film directed by Kevin Macdonald. The sequel to the 2011 film Life in a Day, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on February 1, 2021, and on YouTube February 6, to generally favorable critical reviews. Like its predecessor, it comprises a wide array of selected video clips showing things happening in the world on one day: July 25, 2020.
↑ "Life in a Day now available on YouTube". 31 October 2011. Archived from the original on 1 November 2011. Retrieved 31 October 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), YouTube's official blog ().
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
