Elvis Wedding, Giraffe Birth Highlight YouTube Collection: Film1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minute“Life in a Day” opens with a shot of the moon and closes with a picture of a snail.
In between, we see people sleeping, brushing their teeth and praying. A baby giraffe is born, a cow is slaughtered and elephants frolic in a watering hole. A Korean man rides his bicycle around the world and an American woman shows off her stitches from a cancer operation. A young couple walks down the aisle in an Elvis-themed wedding and an elderly couple renew their vows to celebrate 50 years of marriage.
The 90-minute film, directed by Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) and produced by Ridley Scott, was compiled from more than 80,000 YouTube videos shot in 192 countries on the same day — July 24, 2010.
Asking amateur videophiles to chronicle their everyday lives and then turning all that footage into a compelling film proves to be problematic. For every striking scene, there are a dozen mundane ones. It’s like searching for the prize in a cereal box.
Macdonald tries to organize the documentary by assembling montages of similar activities and themes, but that quickly gets old. Other sequences include people answering broad questions such as “What do you love?” and “What do you fear?”
