How the user-generated film 'Life in a Day' was made (via Wired UK)

By Katie Scott,17 June 11

""Herculean" is how film editor Joe Walker describes the task that faced his team in the production of Life in a Day -- the user-generated film that hits UK screen today.

To make this 90-minute menagerie, which documents one day -- 24 July, 2010 -- around the world, his team watched and logged key words for 80,000 videos from 197 countries. "We sat the team in front of iMacs, gave them a lot of coffee, chocolate and biscuits, and told to get on with viewing," Walker told Wired.co.uk.

In fact, they watched 4,500 hours of footage, which had been uploaded to YouTube in response to a request by film director and documentary maker Kevin MacDonald (One Day in September and Touching the Void)...."

Nice Post - Life in a Day – Review « moviegeekblog - Grazie for sending!

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Excerpt from a welcome review! I'll be catching Life In A Day when it's released in July

"Last year (2010) YouTube launched a campaign, supported by executive producers Tony and Ridley Scott, asking everybody with a camcorder to record a day in their lives. Fast forward a year to 2011 and director Kevin Macdonald and editor Joe Walker (never an editor has been more crucial to the making of a film), release their documentary to the world and to the same people who actually filmed it.
Apparently 80000 videos for a total of 4500 hours were submitted from 126 different nations.

The result is a film that tells the story of a day on Earth, and precisely the 24th of July 2010: 24 hours in the life of ordinary people. Their stories, their images, their thoughts, all linked together by an incredible work of editing and a rousing soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams.

You can argue that some of it might be slightly heavy-handed (a shot of a cow being killed on camera is then, non very subtlety, cut together with a man eating from a bowl of spaghetti), but some of the choices are absolutely inspired (montage sequences of people getting up in the morning or having breakfast or simply walking). It’s the amalgamation of all these little snippets of life that makes the film an incredible watch and in the end it ends up actually telling a story as the ordinary becomes extraordinary..."