By Anealla Safdar

Film: Life In A Day

Year: 2011
Director: Kevin Macdonald 


Running Time: 95 min

Genre: Documentary

‘Life In A Day’ epitomises crowd-sourcing.

On a summer’s day in 2010, director Kevin Macdonald (‘The Last King of Scotland’, ‘The Eagle’) launched a media campaign. Using television and the internet, he and executive producer Ridley Scott (‘Blade Runner’, ‘Prometheus’) called on people anywhere in the world with a camera to film their lives in one day and answer simple questions. ‘What do you fear?’, ‘What’s in your pocket?’, ‘What do you love?’

That day, 24 July, 2010, is shown repeatedly in shots of alarm clocks, car radios and as people speak to camera; it is the film’s central character.

Macdonald said he did 26 satellite interviews in a day during the press-heavy week. Scott appealed to potential filmmakers in a video posted on YouTube – the same site that would later accept more than 80,000 submissions. “There’s no excuse. You have a digital camera, go out and shoot your film,” he implored.

Executive Producer Ridley Scott calls on audiences to participate on YouTube

Clips came in from almost all over the world. To make sure everywhere was covered, Macdonald ordered £40,000 (QAR 236,135) worth of cameras. He posted them to NGOs and asked their members to entrust cameramen in remote countries with the same mission.

It took a multi-lingual team of producers seven weeks to watch 4,500 hours of submitted footage.

The result is a 95-minute montage of the world and its people shot in varying degrees of quality, pinned with an emotive musical score that tells the film’s story. The sounds of British composer Harry Gregson Williams (‘The Borrowers’, ‘Phone Booth’), electronic musician Matthew Herbert and, briefly, pop-singer Ellie Goulding form the soundtrack. Little of Earth, from America to Japan, the United Arab Emirates to Portugal, is left uncovered.

People and animals are shown giving birth, waking up, eating, praying, sleeping and carrying out other routine activities that are edited down and clipped together to look mesmerising. A few characters reappear, linking the motion-picture tapestry.

The greater number of happy moments depicted makes darker events more interesting. The brutal killing of a sheep is difficult but poignant, for example. The scene of a Chinese boy and his father paying their respects to their dead mother and wife tugs on heartstrings.

‘Life In A Day’ is a contemporary interpretation of what was, in the early eighties, an aesthetically original style. Director Godfrey Reggio, composer Phillip Glass and cinematographer Ron Fricke’s ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, which premiered in 1982, is an environmental documentary accompanied by a score that became so popular it took Glass’ ensemble on a world tour. Ten years later, Fricke worked again as cinematographer for ‘Baraka’, similarly a set of impeccably photographed scenes, this time of natural events and humanity.

The experimental YouTube film, inspired by these past examples, works excellently as a time-capsule for future audiences in showing how cohesive the internet was in 2010. It also demonstrates the ease of filming in an age that relies on, and enjoys, digital technology. To a lesser extent, it is a documentary of what life was like on 24 July, 2010. Given its global appeal, similarities to reality-television and use of regular people as filmmakers, some might be itching for a sequel.