Like cribbing a line from RENT, it turns out there’s 276,000 minutes in A Life In A Day.
The crowdsourced documentary experiment from executive producer Ridley Scott and director Kevin Macdonald is a partnership between LG, YouTube and the Sundance Institute to document one day (July 24th 2010) around the world. According to a press release from yesterday, the great culling of digital ‘celluoid’ has begun under Macdonald and 20 other editors.
Crowdsourcing has grown in buzz popularity in the last year among the world premiere of Jeff Deutchman’s 11-4-08 , a global view on the U.S. presidential election, at South By Southwest and the tad-more-gimmicky 140 shot in 2009 according to Movieline.
The former doc comes together from a variety of people approached by Deutchman to document their routine on election day according to an interview with indieWIRE. The narrative switching between a day at the office in New York for one group to last-minute canvasing in the Midwest, 11-4-08 provides a thought-provoking look back at what had the world excited for one day. Despite its premiere, Deutchman still asks for people to submit their footage from that day and combine it into a greater digital collection of what happened.
As for 140, it’s about–per the production notes linked on Movieline–“140 people in 140 locations around the world shoot 140 seconds of what connects them to their home.”
It seems like crowdsourcing can be stuck under plans or gimmicks, but if Life can replicate even a modicum of what 11-4-08 presented to crowds at SXSW then there’s faith for it in January when freezing crowds in Park City gather around with their iPhones and Flip Cams held out at the premiere to document the doc.
A Life In A Day will premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.