joeadamfry

My thoughts on YouTube’s ‘Life in a Day’

Catching the ‘Life in a Day’ YouTube Live event yesterday morning (1am GMT) was a real treat. It premiered at Utah’s Sundance Festival and was broadcast live around the world from there. The premise of the film is basically that the YouTube community was asked to record a day (24th July 2010) in their lives, and users responded from all around the world with 80 000 clips totalling 4500 hours of footage.

Kevin MacDonald and Ridley Scott were then responsible for editing this footage down into a 90 minute film of spliced narrative, moving from country to country in an incredibly shot UGC journey through a day in the life on earth. Initially skeptical at this venture’s potential to be a bit flimsy, I was amazed at the quality of the shooting, the honesty of the films ‘cast’, and the way in which it moved from the deeply emotional to the visually sublime to the bizarre to the unusual to the laugh out loud genuinely funny resulted in a truly engaging and delightful film. Highlights included a monkey dressed as a Grandma, a Korean dude who’d been cycling around the world for the past 9 years (hospitalised 6 times - “there’s a lot of bad motorists in the world”) and an incredible scene featuring an impossibly cute Spanish girl climbing to the top of a human pyramid type thing.

Check the previews at http://youtube.com/lifeinaday and I believe the film will be available again online soon, so watch this space.