Life in a Day (YouTube)
Encyclopedia
Life in a Day is a crowdsourced
documentary 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, July 24, 2010.
The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations. The completed film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival
on January 27, 2011 and the premiere was streamed live on YouTube. On October 31, 2011, YouTube announced that Life in a Day would be available for viewing on its website free of charge, and on DVD.
video sharing site. The film was distributed by National Geographic Films. The visual effects were produced by Lip Sync Post.
The film was the creation of a partnership among YouTube
, Ridley Scott Associates and LG electronics
, announced on July 6, 2010. Users sent in videos supposed to be recorded on July 24, 2010, and then Ridley Scott
produced the film and edited the videos into a film with director Kevin Macdonald
and film editor Joe Walker, consisting of footage from some of the contributors. All chosen footage authors are credited as co-directors.
The film's music was written by British composer and producer Harry Gregson-Williams
, along with Matthew Herbert
. The film's opening song, written by Herbert, was performed by British singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding
. The film also features the song 'Jerusalem' by Kieran Leonard
and 'Future Prospect' by Biggi Hilmars.
Director Kevin 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." Editor Joe Walker said that as he understood it, the concept for the crowdsourced
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 organized 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."
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." "(W)e did resort to snail mail for sending out 400 cameras to parts of the developing world — and getting back the resulting video cards." The Los Angeles Times
Betsy Sharkey described that "guidelines the filmmakers threw out made for a very open-ended foundation for the film: what's your story, what have you got in your pockets, what do you fear". 80,000 individual clips were received, amounting to 4,500 hours of electronic footage.
Director Kevin 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." Film editor Joe 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." 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."
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.” "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."
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.” 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. 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.
In addition to the star rating system, the editing/selecting team also organized 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 rate
s to make the result cinematically acceptable.
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 editor Joe Walker adding that the particular day, July 24, 2010, was chosen because it was the first Saturday after the World Cup
.
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." 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."
Director Kevin 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." 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." "The story is told through the voices of the contributors, but mostly it's the images that do the heavy lifting."
Macdonald explained that the film "doesn't have a traditional story or a traditional narrative, but it has thematic movement…and ... recurring characters." 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." Asked if there any particular submission crystallized the film's theme, Macdonald cited "the family who had been going through cancer." More generally, Macdonald praised the immediacy that a handycam permits.
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." The Washington Posts 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." 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." 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." 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 World
ers 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."
The Los Angeles Times
Betsy 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, likable, unpredictable and yet predictable bunch."
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." The Washington Posts Michael 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." Anthony Benigno wrote in Filmcritic.com that the film "is pretty much the first social-media
movie ever made."
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." 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."
Sharkey characterized 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."
reports that 82% of 52 critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 7.1 out of 10. Metacritic
gave the film a rating average of 58/100, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
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." 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." 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." Wired
magazine's Angela Watercutter wrote that the film "brims with intimacy and urgency."
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,"Rabinowitz, Mark, "Review: 'Life in a Day' an inspiring snapshot of planet Earth" (WebCite archive), CNN
.com, July 29, 2011. with CNN Newsroom
s Josh Levs
remarking that the film is "the best time capsule in the history of the world." Ian Buckwalter of Washingtonian
magazine called the condensed experiences "breathtaking" and "as riveting as any narrative."
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." Andrew Schenker from Slant Magazine
criticized the film by stating "Only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism
that the film celebrates." Contentions such as Shenker'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."
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." V.A. Musetto, a critic of the New York Post
, said about the film: "Judging by the National Geographic doc "Life in a Day," a lot of nothing happened on July 24, 2010." 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."
Two writers for The New York Times
adopted opposing opinions. Mike Hale's review assserted 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." 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."
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: November 12, 2011. Ridley Scott
will oversee the project, with executive producer Kevin Macdonald (both from Life in a Day) and director Morgan Mathews
.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....
documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010.
The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations. The completed film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...
on January 27, 2011 and the premiere was streamed live on YouTube. On October 31, 2011, YouTube announced that Life in a Day would be available for viewing on its website free of charge, and on DVD.
Production
The film was produced by Scott Free Productions and the YouTubeYouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
video sharing site. The film was distributed by National Geographic Films. The visual effects were produced by Lip Sync Post.
The film was the creation of a partnership among YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, Ridley Scott Associates and LG electronics
LG Electronics
LG Electronics is a global electronics and telecommunications company headquartered in Yeouido, Seoul, South Korea. The company operates its business through five divisions: mobile communications, home entertainment, home appliance, air conditioning and business solution...
, announced on July 6, 2010. Users sent in videos supposed to be recorded on July 24, 2010, and then Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. His most famous films include The Duellists , Alien , Blade Runner , Legend , Thelma & Louise , G. I...
produced the film and edited the videos into a film with director Kevin Macdonald
Kevin MacDonald (director)
Kevin Macdonald is a Scottish director, best known for his films One Day in September, State of Play, The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void.-Personal life:...
and film editor Joe Walker, consisting of footage from some of the contributors. All chosen footage authors are credited as co-directors.
The film's music was written by British composer and producer Harry Gregson-Williams
Harry Gregson-Williams
Harry Gregson-Williams is a prolific British composer, orchestrator, conductor, and music producer. He is best known for his film scores, of which he has composed over sixty using electronic music and orchestral pieces...
, along with Matthew Herbert
Matthew Herbert
Matthew Herbert , also known as Herbert, Doctor Rockit, Radio Boy, Mr. Vertigo, Transformer, and Wishmountain, is a British electronic musician...
. The film's opening song, written by Herbert, was performed by British singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding
Ellie Goulding
Elena Jane "Ellie" Goulding is an English singer-songwriter. In 2010 she became only the second artist to both top the BBC's annual Sound of... poll, and win the Critics' Choice Award at the BRIT Awards in the same year, following Adele's win of both in 2008...
. The film also features the song 'Jerusalem' by Kieran Leonard
Kieran Leonard
Kieran Leonard is a British singer-songwriter and musician of Irish descent, who performs as a solo artist and with his four piece band he refers to as 'The Horses'.He is particularly known for his poetical songwriting, and compelling live performances...
and 'Future Prospect' by Biggi Hilmars.
Director Kevin Macdonald
Kevin MacDonald (director)
Kevin Macdonald is a Scottish director, best known for his films One Day in September, State of Play, The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void.-Personal life:...
told The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the 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
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
video, ... and elevate it into art." Editor Joe Walker said that as he understood it, the concept for the crowdsourced
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....
documentary came from Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. His most famous films include The Duellists , Alien , Blade Runner , Legend , Thelma & Louise , G. I...
's production company "Scott Free U.K." and from YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, 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 organized 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."
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." "(W)e did resort to snail mail for sending out 400 cameras to parts of the developing world — and getting back the resulting video cards." The Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
Betsy Sharkey described that "guidelines the filmmakers threw out made for a very open-ended foundation for the film: what's your story, what have you got in your pockets, what do you fear". 80,000 individual clips were received, amounting to 4,500 hours of electronic footage.
Director Kevin Macdonald expressed to The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the 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." Film editor Joe Walker told Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
magazine's Angela Watercutter that the film "couldn't have been made without technology. Ten years ago it would've been impossible." 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."
The filmmaking team “used YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
'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.” "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."
Walker, whose team edited the whole film over seven weeks, remarked to Adam Sternbergh of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
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.” 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. 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.
In addition to the star rating system, the editing/selecting team also organized 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 rate
Frame rate
Frame rate is the frequency at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. The term applies equally well to computer graphics, video cameras, film cameras, and motion capture systems...
s to make the result cinematically acceptable.
Themes and content
Director Kevin MacdonaldKevin MacDonald (director)
Kevin Macdonald is a Scottish director, best known for his films One Day in September, State of Play, The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void.-Personal life:...
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 editor Joe Walker adding that the particular day, July 24, 2010, was chosen because it was the first Saturday after the World Cup
2010 FIFA World Cup
The 2010 FIFA World Cup was the 19th FIFA World Cup, the world championship for men's national association football teams. It took place in South Africa from 11 June to 11 July 2010...
.
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
Rorschach test
The Rorschach test is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning...
—"you will see in it what you want to see in it." 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."
Director Kevin Macdonald said he saw the movie "as a metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
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." Betsy Sharkey wrote in the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
that "this fast-paced documentary is shaped as much by Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
savvy as traditional filmmaking, which doesn't make the experience of it any less satisfying, or the implications any less provocative." "The story is told through the voices of the contributors, but mostly it's the images that do the heavy lifting."
Macdonald explained that the film "doesn't have a traditional story or a traditional narrative, but it has thematic movement…and ... recurring characters." 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." Asked if there any particular submission crystallized the film's theme, Macdonald cited "the family who had been going through cancer." More generally, Macdonald praised the immediacy that a handycam permits.
Ian Buckwalter of Washingtonian
Washingtonian (magazine)
Washingtonian is a monthly magazine distributed in the Washington, DC area since 1965. The magazine describes itself as "the magazine Washington lives by." The magazine's core focuses are local feature journalism, guide book-style articles, and real estate advice.-Editorial Content: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." The Washington Posts 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." Liz Braun, writing in the Toronto Sun
Toronto Sun
The Toronto Sun is an English-language daily tabloid newspaper published in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for its daily Sunshine Girl feature and for what it sees as a populist conservative editorial stance.-History:...
, 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." Toronto Star
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...
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." However, The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
'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
Lamborghini
Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A., commonly referred to as Lamborghini , is an Italian car manufacturer. The company was founded by manufacturing magnate Ferruccio Lamborghini in 1963, with the objective of producing a refined grand touring car to compete with established offerings from marques like...
keys from his pocket, ... then mov(ing) on to ragged-looking Third World
Developing country
A developing country, also known as a less-developed country, is a nation with a low level of material well-being. Since no single definition of the term developing country is recognized internationally, the levels of development may vary widely within so-called developing countries...
ers amusedly scoffing at the idea that they'd have anything in their pockets," and a Westerner
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
"quietly worries about losing his hair, while an older Afghan man quietly worries about getting through the day alive."
The Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
Betsy 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, likable, unpredictable and yet predictable bunch."
Yumi Goto of TIME LightBox
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
remarked that "the most striking aspect of this documentary is that it's the first crowdsourced
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....
, user-generated content to hit the big screen." The Washington Posts Michael O'Sullivan said that, being "alternately funny, scary, boring, moving, amateurish and gorgeous, it is a pretty spectacular thing: a crowdsourced
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....
movie that manages to feel singular and whole." Anthony Benigno wrote in Filmcritic.com that the film "is pretty much the first social-media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
movie ever made."
The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
' 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." The Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
' Betsy Sharkey wrote that "The fact that we all experienced that day is part of what gives the documentary an unusual kind of relatability."
Sharkey characterized 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
One Day in September
One Day in September is a 1999 documentary film directed by Kevin Macdonald examining the 5 September 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany...
, 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."
Reception
Life in a Day has received generally positive reception from film critics. Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reports that 82% of 52 critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 7.1 out of 10. Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
gave the film a rating average of 58/100, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
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." 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." Peter Howell, a critic of the Toronto Star
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...
, gave the film three out of four stars, saying "the vast majority of the film feels undeniably real and incredibly inspiring." Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
magazine's Angela Watercutter wrote that the film "brims with intimacy and urgency."
CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
'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,"Rabinowitz, Mark, "Review: 'Life in a Day' an inspiring snapshot of planet Earth" (WebCite archive), CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
.com, July 29, 2011. with CNN Newsroom
CNN Newsroom
CNN Newsroom is an American news program on CNN/US.Broadcasting throughout the week, Newsroom features live and taped news reports, in addition to analysis from experts on the issues being covered, and headlines throughout each hour. The program tends to focus on softer news than their hard news...
s Josh Levs
Josh Levs
Joshua Levs, commonly known as Josh Levs, is an American broadcast journalist based in Atlanta, Georgia, who reported for the CNN news television network. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale University, where he was elected president of his United Synagogue Youth chapter and where a...
remarking that the film is "the best time capsule in the history of the world." Ian Buckwalter of Washingtonian
Washingtonian (magazine)
Washingtonian is a monthly magazine distributed in the Washington, DC area since 1965. The magazine describes itself as "the magazine Washington lives by." The magazine's core focuses are local feature journalism, guide book-style articles, and real estate advice.-Editorial Content:Washingtonian...
magazine called the condensed experiences "breathtaking" and "as riveting as any narrative."
Liz Braun, writing in the Toronto Sun
Toronto Sun
The Toronto Sun is an English-language daily tabloid newspaper published in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for its daily Sunshine Girl feature and for what it sees as a populist conservative editorial stance.-History:...
, 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." Andrew Schenker from Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine is an online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New York Film Festival.- History :...
criticized the film by stating "Only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism
Narcissism
Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...
that the film celebrates." Contentions such as Shenker's were contradicted by The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
' Adam Sternbergh who wrote that "if the knock against the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
... is that it stokes our collective narcissism
Narcissism
Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...
, 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."
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
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
should have a point, narrative, conflict and goal, but called this film "scattershot" and "at its worst, veering closer into exploitation...and even voyeurism." V.A. Musetto, a critic of the New York Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
, said about the film: "Judging by the National Geographic doc "Life in a Day," a lot of nothing happened on July 24, 2010." A counterpoint was expressed by the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
' 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."
Two writers for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
adopted opposing opinions. Mike Hale's review assserted 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." 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."
Follow-on projects, and legacy
In October 2011, BBC NewsBBC News
BBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...
announced that Britain in a Day
Britain in a Day
Britain In A Day is a forthcoming crowdsourced documentary film that will consist of a series clips of footage shot by members of the public in Britain on 12th November 2011...
would be funded by BBC Learning
BBC Learning
BBC Learning can refer to the following:* A department within the BBC , part of BBC Vision* The portal website created by BBC Learning* A website created by BBC Worldwide-BBC Worldwide:...
as part of BBC's "Cultural Olympiad," with the Britain in a Day
Britain in a Day
Britain In A Day is a forthcoming crowdsourced documentary film that will consist of a series clips of footage shot by members of the public in Britain on 12th November 2011...
YouTube channel accepting video contributions from the public about their lives on a specific day: November 12, 2011. Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. His most famous films include The Duellists , Alien , Blade Runner , Legend , Thelma & Louise , G. I...
will oversee the project, with executive producer Kevin Macdonald (both from Life in a Day) and director Morgan Mathews
Morgan Matthews (filmmaker)
Morgan Matthews is an English, factual director. He is the founder of Minnow Films and has won many awards, including a BAFTA for his documentary ‘The Fallen’....
.
See also
- Kevin MacdonaldKevin MacDonald (director)Kevin Macdonald is a Scottish director, best known for his films One Day in September, State of Play, The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void.-Personal life:...
- Ridley ScottRidley ScottSir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer. His most famous films include The Duellists , Alien , Blade Runner , Legend , Thelma & Louise , G. I...
- CrowdsourcingCrowdsourcingCrowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....
- YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
- National Geographic SocietyNational Geographic SocietyThe National Geographic Society , headquartered in Washington, D.C. in the United States, is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world. Its interests include geography, archaeology and natural science, the promotion of environmental and historical...
- Time capsuleTime capsuleA time capsule is an historic cache of goods or information, usually intended as a method of communication with future people and to help future archaeologists, anthropologists, or historians...
External links
- Full length video of movie on YouTube (WebCite archive)