Life in a Day (2011 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Life in a Day began with three questions. "What do you love? What do you fear? What's in your pocket?" Director Kevin Macdonald posed those questions to ordinary people around the world one summer, then asked them to spend a day filming their lives. What came back was staggering: 80,000 video clips from 192 nations, totalling 4,500 hours of footage. From that mountain of material, a 94-minute-53-second film was cut, debuting at the Sundance Film Festival on the 27th of January 2011. The premiere was streamed live on YouTube at the same moment. How do you turn a field of rubble into a cathedral? That question sat at the heart of the entire enterprise, and the answer required a new kind of filmmaking that nobody had quite attempted before.

• 2. A Collaboration Born From a Birthday

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  The project was announced on the 6th of July 2010, nearly three weeks before cameras were supposed to roll. Macdonald told The Wall Street Journal that the whole thing was initially conceived as a way to mark the fifth birthday of YouTube. He wanted, in his own words, to "take the humble YouTube video... and elevate it into art." Editor Joe Walker traced the idea more precisely, saying the concept originated from Ridley Scott's UK production company, Scott Free. Macdonald drew a different kind of inspiration from the 1930s. A British movement called Mass Observation had asked hundreds of people across Britain to write diary entries recording the details of their lives on one day a month and to answer a few simple questions. Those diaries were then compiled into books and articles, deliberately amplifying voices outside the social elite. Macdonald saw the crowd-sourced film as a digital heir to that tradition. Produced by Scott Free Productions and YouTube, the film was distributed by National Geographic Entertainment, with visual effects handled by Lip Sync Post. LG Electronics also partnered on the collaboration. Users retained copyright over their video submissions but agreed to grant a non-exclusive licence for their footage to appear in the film, and every chosen contributor was credited as a co-director.

• 3. The Editing Room

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  Walker described the task of shaping 4,500 hours of raw footage as being told to build Salisbury Cathedral from a field of rubble. His team worked over seven weeks to cut the whole film. Roughly two dozen researchers, selected for both a cinematic eye and proficiency with multiple languages, watched, logged, tagged, and rated each of the 80,000 clips on a scale of one to five stars. Walker was direct about the results: "the vast amount of material was two stars." He and Macdonald then focused their attention on the four-star and five-star clips. Beyond the star system, the team organised submissions by country, theme, and video quality, and had to convert from 60 different frame rates to produce a result that was cinematically acceptable. All the logging and cataloguing was handled using Quantum CatDV media asset management software. Walker put the sheer scale in personal terms. For a recent film he had cut for director Steve McQueen, there had been 21 hours of material to work with. Here the team had to navigate more than 200 times that amount. Macdonald said that the 300 hours of best footage effectively told him what the film's themes and structure ought to be, comparing the raw material to a Rorschach test: "you will see in it what you want to see in it."

• 4. Reaching the Developing World

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  About 75 percent of the film's footage came through YouTube, traditional advertising, television programmes, and newspapers. The remaining 25 percent required a different approach. Macdonald was emphatic: "It was important to represent the whole world." At a reported cost of 40,000 pounds, the team sent 400 cameras by post to parts of the developing world and retrieved the resulting video cards the same way. Macdonald later admitted this approach had been naive. He regretted not sending far fewer cameras while providing proper training in camera operation and in the kind of content the project sought. He observed that both the concept of a documentary and the idea that one's own opinions are worth sharing were genuinely foreign to many people in those regions. The particular date chosen for filming, the 24th of July 2010, was not arbitrary. It was the first Saturday after the end of the World Cup, selected because Macdonald wanted a day with a communal, global resonance, a day when the world was not in the grip of a single event yet was still, in some sense, on the same emotional footing.

• 5. Structure and Theme

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  Macdonald chose to anchor the film to a single day because, as he put it, a day is "the basic temporal building block of human life, wherever you are." Walker explained that the film operated on more than one clock simultaneously: "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." The film opens in pre-dawn darkness and moves through morning, afternoon, and evening in a rhythm that critic Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times described as shaped as much by internet sensibility as by traditional filmmaking. Macdonald saw the whole film as a metaphor for browsing the internet, clicking from place to place "in this almost random way, following our own thoughts, following narrative and thematic paths." Specific moments stayed with him: a skydiving shot he called "the most technically amazing" he had ever seen in any film, a hand picking a fly from a windowpane and then releasing it outside, and a family working through a cancer diagnosis. He praised the immediacy that a handheld camera permits, saying the film "doesn't have a traditional story or a traditional narrative, but it has thematic movement and recurring characters." The music was composed by Harry Gregson-Williams and Matthew Herbert, with the opening song performed by singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding. The film also features the song "Jerusalem" by Kieran Leonard and "Future Prospect" by Biggi Hilmars.

• 6. Reception and Debate

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  Rotten Tomatoes reported that 82 percent of 52 critics gave Life in a Day a positive review, with a rating average of 7.1 out of 10. Metacritic placed it at 58 out of 100, indicating mixed or average reviews. Michael O'Sullivan of the Washington Post awarded the film three and a half stars out of four, calling it "without exaggeration, a profound achievement." Empire's Helen O'Hara called it "moving and insightful." Wired's Angela Watercutter wrote that it "brims with intimacy and urgency." A CNN commentator described it as "quite possibly the first large-scale, global use of the Internet to create meaningful and beautiful art." Dissenting voices were pointed. Andrew Schenker from Slant Magazine wrote that "only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism that the film celebrates." Anthony Benigno from Filmcritic.com called it "scattershot" and at its worst verging on voyeurism. A critic from the New York Post dismissed the entire exercise, arguing that by the evidence of Life in a Day, very little of consequence happened on the 24th of July 2010. Within the New York Times alone, reviewers divided sharply: Mike Hale found the assembly "resolutely conventional and soft-headed," while Adam Sternbergh argued that the repeated montages of ordinary acts "take on a kind of profundity." Sternbergh also rebutted the narcissism charge directly, writing that the film's best moments revealed "not a global craving for exposure but a surprising universal willingness to allow ourselves to be exposed."

• 7. The Labour Question

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  Beneath the critical debate ran a harder structural argument. Film productions typically pay the crews who capture their images and sounds. In Life in a Day, the footage was provided by YouTube users who received nothing in return, even as the finished film screened in commercial theatres for a profit. That criticism surfaced explicitly and was not dismissed by the filmmakers. Macdonald himself acknowledged that the project was only financially and organisationally feasible because of YouTube's infrastructure. Before platforms of that scale existed, he said, the project simply could not have been undertaken. Walker made the same point to Wired, saying flatly: "The film couldn't have been made without technology. Ten years ago it would've been impossible." The team relied on multilingual film students working in what Macdonald described as a "sweatshop" arrangement to sift through the submitted material. On the 31st of October 2011, YouTube announced that Life in a Day would be available to view on its platform free of charge and also on DVD, removing even the price barrier that had existed when the film was in theatres.

• 8. A Spawning Ground

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  Life in a Day became the template for a format that spread widely. In October 2011, BBC News announced that Britain in a Day would be funded by BBC Learning as part of its Cultural Olympiad project, accepting contributions recorded on the 12th of November 2011, with Morgan Mathews directing and Macdonald and Scott serving as executive producers. Japan in a Day followed in 2012, directed by Philip Martin and Gaku Narita, drawing on YouTube footage filmed by survivors of Japan's 2011 tsunami. Macdonald and Scott returned to the format with Christmas in a Day in November 2013, a 48-minute documentary built from crowd-sourced clips recorded on Christmas 2012, on which a 3.5-minute advertisement for UK supermarket Sainsbury's was later based. Italy in a Day arrived in September 2014, directed by Gabriele Salvatores from 45,000 submissions recorded on the 26th of October 2013, premiering at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. India in a Day followed in 2015, Spain in a Day by Isabel Coixet in 2016, Canada in a Day in 2017, and Panama in a Day in 2019. The format eventually circled back to its origin with Life in a Day 2020, released in 2021, repeating the exercise that had begun with a single question posed to the world on a Saturday in July.