Life in a Day (2011) on Netflix
PG-1320111h 35mDocumentaryDrama
On 24 July 2010, volunteers in 192 countries filmed their own lives and sent the footage in. From 80,000 submissions, one day's recordings became a crowd-sourced documentary.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.6/1015,795 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
The project was announced in July 2010 and asked people around the world to record their lives on a single Saturday, 24 July 2010, and to answer three questions: what they love, what they fear and what is in their pockets. Roughly 80,000 clips arrived from 192 nations, 4,500 hours in total. Cameras were mailed to parts of the developing world, and about a quarter of the finished film came from that material. Researchers logged, tagged and rated every clip, and the chosen ones were cut into a feature. The day's clips run from pre-dawn to night, from birth to death.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Life in a Day (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Life in a Day was criticized for using free labor: the YouTube users who shot the footage were not paid, even though the finished film was shown in cinemas for profit.
- Kevin Macdonald sent 400 cameras to the developing world by post, at a reported cost of £40,000, to gather the 25% of the film's content that could not come through YouTube.
- Editors cut 4,500 hours of footage submitted by 80,000 people in 192 nations down to a film of 94 minutes 53 seconds.
- A team of about two dozen multilingual researchers rated every clip from one to five stars; Joe Walker said most of the material was two stars, and he and Kevin Macdonald watched only the four- and five-star clips.
- Kevin Macdonald said the idea for the film came from the Mass Observation movement, a 1930s British group that asked hundreds of people to keep diaries recording one day of their lives.
