YouTube Makes a Movie: 'Life in a Day' Premieres at Sundance Film Festival

Jan. 27, 2010— -- Is it possible to capture one day on earth in a single movie?

That's the ambitious goal of director Kevin Macdonald and tens of thousands of YouTube users around the world in "Life in a Day," a film making its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

Last summer, Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott asked anyone who was willing to grab a video camera and record their lives on a single day, Saturday, July 24. Over 80,000 clips -- some 4,500 hours of footage -- were uploaded for the project, coming from 192 countries.

The submissions have been edited into a 90-minute film, which premiered at Sundance and streamed at YouTube.com.

"The actual amount of really strong stuff is enough to make a 24-hour film," said Macdonald, who directed the 2006 film "The Last King of Scotland."

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Macdonald and a team of film students combed through the clips, tagging them by subject and rating them on a star system -- 1 star for the worst, 5 for the best, and 6 for clips so bad that they were good. The raw clips have been posted to a YouTube channel where anyone can browse videos through maps and keywords.

The videos, shot on everything from cell phones to professional cameras, document the remarkable diversity of the globe -- births, deaths and everything in between, from the momentous to the mundane.

"I'm not saying it's all fantastic," Macdonald said. "There's a fairly large amount of narcissistic, boring teenage rants."

But there's also plenty of beauty. The organizers distributed hundreds of video cameras to some of the most remote corners of the globe -- deep into rainforests and remote regions of Africa.

In choosing which footage made the final film, Macdonald said, they looked for honesty and intimacy above all else.

Soma Helmi, a filmmaker from Bali, Indonesia, recorded her housekeeper as she made prayer offerings in a lush garden.

"In the beginning, you just upload your footage and you don't know where it's going," she said. "You just know that there are thousands of people doing the same thing."