YouTube movie almost complete

Scottish director Kevin Mcdonald is putting the final touches to his latest film Life In A Day, created entirely from submitted YouTube clips, to be premièred at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Each clip is a few moments in the life of a YouTube user on the 24th July, 2010. Mcdonald set up a dedicated portal so that submissions could be easily received. He was not disappointed; 80,000 individual clips were uploaded from all over the world, which translated into 5,000 hours of footage.

With a dedicated team of editors, the director of The Last King Of Scotland and Touching The Void cut the vast majority of submissions to 200 hours, before a final edit to bring the film to a more acceptable 1.5 hours.

The film is being portrayed as a “single day on earth”, according to Mcdonald himself. As well as the thousands of submissions streaming in from the Western hemisphere, to gain a more balanced product the team bought over 400 cameras and sent them to less-developed parts of the world, including Africa and Latin America.

Mcdonald remarked that “some of the material is really extraordinary”, and admitted that some clips are rather darker in content. One example given is the Love Parade in Duisberg, Germany, where 500 people were injured and 21 people killed in stampedes, which was captured on mobile phones by hundreds.

Despite this, Mcdonald feels that the film provides an intimate shot of human life, as well as human nature, that reveals more positives than negatives. “It's an optimistic film. It's a film about how wonderful it is to be alive”.

All 5,000 hours of original footage can still be viewed at the Life In A Day channel on YouTube.