Life in a Day YouTube Channel

The most elaborate crowdsourced arts project in history, YouTube’s surprisingly satisfying, sometimes thrilling Life in a Day draws from a huge pot of source material: 80,000 slice-of-life videos, comprising more than 4,500 hours of video, all shot on July 24, 2010. A team led by producer Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald (Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) edited the choice bits into a 90-minute feature film.

While Life in a Day might seem like an expensive corporate stunt, the final product is a groundbreaking piece of cinematic assemblage. The film premieres Thursday night at the Sundance Film Festival and on YouTube, with a possible theatrical release later in 2011.

The project unfolded like this: Users from around the world uploaded whatever they wanted — “a sunrise, the commute to work, a neighborhood soccer match,” the website proposed. Macdonald and editor Joe Walker created a media-management system and set 23 assistant editors combing through the material, grading it and sorting it by keyword. Macdonald and Walker then watched the best 250 hours, and recombined their favorite material into loosely organized segments.

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