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Life in a Day

July 24, 2010. A simple day like any other. The only people this day holds any significance to are Jennifer Lopez and Michael Richards, and I’m not sure either of them are still alive. It doesn’t seem like there’d be anything special about this arbitrary Saturday, but that’s the art of Life in a Day (FREE). Had a day like Christmas or Valentine’s Day been chosen, not only would it have probably been a romantic comedy, but it wouldn’t have been Life in a day.

This beautiful little film is composed of more than 80,000 YouTube submissions containing a total of over 4,500 hours of video revealing the daily lives of mankind all over the world. Branching out of 192 countries, every place from rural villages to developed cities contributed to the movie by recording life through their eyes and showing the world their July 24th. Renowned producer Ridley Scott took on the challenge of compiling this risky experiment into the first user-generated film which condenses most all of a person’s life into one 90 minute feature.

From the daily routines like waking up and brushing your teeth to the acts that most of us will never experience like skydiving or getting some exercise, Life in a Day sums up our time here on Earth and how much or how little of an impact we make on it. Scott, along with Oscar-winning director Kevin MacDonald and 20 lucky “co-directors” (20 of the thousands who submitted footage to YouTube), sat at the film’s premiere this past January at the Sundace Film Festival and saw how their experiment blossomed into a masterpiece of art, blind to race, region and religion. Attendees of the festival were lucky I wasn’t asked to contribute to the film’s content, or else they would have sat through a 24 hour-long composition of me sleeping and watching reruns of Seinfeld on such a random summer day.