14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, YouTube unveiled an ambitious project to document the lives of people from around the world in a day, July 24. The project asked film enthusiasts to submit their videos taken that day. From those, a number will be selected and, under the guidance of Ridley Scott, who will be acting as an executive producer and with editing from Kevin Macdonald, will be turned into Life in a Day, a film to be premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
YouTube has now revealed that there have been 80,000 submissions from almost 200 countries, a huge number any way you look at it. According to the tweet, the 80,000 videos, or the ones YouTube narrows it down to, will be available in an online gallery sometime next month. It’s clear that there’s a lot of footage to go through, but, then again, it was to be expected from such a large-scale project.
Considering YouTube’s huge audience, and the number of people who fancy themselves as amateur film-makers, the response is not entirely surprising. Most likely, it should be fairly simple to weed out the really bad ones and the number of videos up for consideration should go down dramatically. But that still means watching through all of them.
When the initial culling process is done though, the team will still be facing the daunting task of narrowing down thousands of hours of video to a few tens of minutes. And of course, arranging the various videos in such a way that creates a broader story and actually creates a narrative rather than just bundles a bunch of videos together.
But that’s why the project’s got an Oscar-winning editor in the first place. When all is said and done, everyone whose videos will make it into the finished product will be credited as a director. And 20 of the contributors will be invited to the premier.