The makers of Life in a Day condense 4,500 hours of crowdsourced footage into a powerful 90-minute film.
Screengrab: Wired.com

Life in a Day is a simple movie born from a complex process.

The crowdsourced documentary, which opens in select cities Friday, takes a look at July 24, 2010, through the lenses of tens of thousands of average folks who submitted videos of their day to the film’s creators through YouTube. The resulting film comes in at 90 minutes, but started out as 80,000 individual clips amounting to 4,500 hours of electronic footage.

“This film couldn’t have been made without technology,” editor Joe Walker told Wired.com. “Ten years ago it would’ve been impossible. We used YouTube’s ability to collect all of this material and then we had this sort of sweatshop of people, all multilingual film students, to sift through this material. It couldn’t have been done any other way. Nobody had ever done a film like this before, so we had to sort of make it up as we went along.”

Considering the wildly varying quality of the videos that often show up on YouTube, all that content could’ve easily turned into an amorphous blob. It didn’t. The film, executive-produced by Ridley Scott, brims with intimacy and urgency, as if watching it makes viewers feel like they must run out and meet all the new friends they’re watching on screen.

Creating that atmosphere was quite a feat, one that could’ve resulted in something that looked like a cheesy Coca-Cola commercial.

To find out how Life in a Day came together, Wired.com got in touch with Walker (who worked on Steve McQueen’s Hunger) and director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) to find out they managed to find a signal in the noise — and get the scoop on the most bizarre videos submitted to the project.

Wired.com: Where did the idea to do a crowdsourced documentary of this type originate?

Joe Walker: As I understand it, it came from [Ridley Scott's production company] Scott Free U.K. and YouTube getting together to try to find a way to celebrate the fifth anniversary of YouTube. It’s almost impossible to imagine that YouTube’s only been around for five or six years. But it’s true. They had this bright idea of creating the first crowdsourced feature film.

Kevin Macdonald: The inspiration for me was a British group from the 1930s called the Mass Observation movement. They asked hundreds of people all over Britain to write diaries recording the details of their lives on one day a month and answer a few simple questions — “What do you have on your mantle piece?” “Tell us the names of five dogs you meet this week.” These diaries were then organized into books and articles with the intention of giving voice to people who weren’t part of the “elite” and to show the intricacy and strangeness of the seemingly mundane. I simply stole the idea!

Wired.com: How did YouTube come to be a partner in this? Why was it chosen opposed to, say, just having people submit tapes/DVDs etc.?

Macdonald: It wouldn’t have been feasible to make this film prior to the existence of YouTube. It allowed us to tap into a pre-existing community of people around the world and to have a means of distributing information about the film and then receiving people’s “dailies.” It just wouldn’t have been organizationally or financially feasible to undertake this kind of project pre-YouTube. Having said that: In order to reach parts of the world where people don’t have internet access or cheap domestic video cameras, we did resort to snail mail for sending out 400 cameras to parts of the developing world — and getting back the resulting video cards.

Wired.com: How many people total were assigned to review all of the submissions? How did they categorize and tag all the clips and pass them on for consideration for the final film?

Macdonald: About 25 people were employed full-time for two and a half months to view all the material. They organized the material according to countries, themes and video quality and — most importantly — according to a star system: one to five stars (with a six-star rating for “so bad it’s good”). Joe oversaw the huge logistical issues inherent in having such a large editing/selecting team.

Walker: I can’t remember what we started with, it was probably just a dozen, but at that stage we were only expecting about 600 hours of material. To put it in context, I just cut a feature film for Steve McQueen and there’s 21 hours of [film] for that. Then we realized we had 4,500 hours so we expanded our schedule a little bit. It was a Herculean task. It was to take material from whatever source. At one point we had 60 different frame-rates to convert. It was a huge challenge to make it as cinematic as we could.

Wired.com: What are some examples of the more interesting and bizarre videos that were submitted?

Macdonald: A man fainting as he videotapes his wife having a cesarean section. A close-up of a man’s hairy arsehole pushing out a turd into the camera. A goat being slaughtered. Thousands of pairs of feet walking around the world. A man having a 12-inch monkey wrench removed from his throat in Tunisia while the surgeons laughed hysterically.

Walker: We never got to find out why it got in there. Or why the surgeons were having such a good time filming it. It was amazing what people did film. I was fully expecting endless shots of cats and performing dogs.

‘Risk and uncertainty was part of the joy of the project.’

Wired.com: Was there ever a worry that there wouldn’t be enough submissions or that the submissions wouldn’t be of high enough quality?

Macdonald: Of course! But risk and uncertainty was part of the joy of the project. If it had been a sure thing, or if we had known what we were going to get, the process would have been boring.

Walker: We really had a huge panic right before it started: “What if nobody sends anything?” The fact that it was an experiment gives you the ability to fail.

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