TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

'Life in a Day,' Now Live on YouTube

John Jainschigg | Date: 09-10-10 | Comments

Compiling thousands of videos submitted to YouTube from people throughout the globe, filmmakers have created a global time capsule of July 24, 2010.

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'Life in a Day,' Now Live on YouTube
"Life in a Day"�brainchild of director and documentary-film wunderkind Kevin MacDonald ("One Day in September") and executive producer Ridley Scott (of "Alien" and "BladeRunner" fame)�is a video project aimed at creating a global time capsule of July 24, 2010, using YouTube-submitted clips as source material.

Announced in late spring, director MacDonald asked YouTube users to upload clips of arbitrary events taking place on July 24, or to capture short profiles of themselves on that day, answering three basic, but philosophically deep questions: What do you fear? What do you love? What makes you laugh?

More than 80,000 people responded, and the raw video archive has been made public on YouTube (view it here) under a simple, but clever "world globe" user interface that can display upload-density heatmaps and geo-information, surf individual videos in a grid format, and view sets of videos by tag and in comparison-pairs around thematic dipoles (e.g., "happy/sad").

The final film, which MacDonald and team are now assembling and editing, will debut in January 2011 at Sundance, with 20 contributors of its video source material in attendance. It will be interesting to see that finished work for many reasons: for starters, to learn what elements, out of this vast polycultural archive, catch the production team's attention; and to see how momentum and structure are created, pacing is managed, and themes are explored. And it will be interesting to hear MacDonald and his colleagues discuss the film post-facto to see if pre-existing assumptions about the source material and production process were borne out; whether discoveries were made; and what those discoveries were.

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