YouTube has become a library of human experience, with hundreds of thousands of people documenting every moment of the minutiae in their lives. There are kittens dreaming, babies biting their brothers, beaux proposing — hours and hours of individuals calling out to the world, asking to be noticed.
To wrangle YouTube into any cohesive story seems almost impossible: 13 million videos were uploaded in 2010, the equivalent of 240,000 full-length films each week.The latest attempt to create order out of all that chaos, the documentary “Life in a Day,” took just one particular day, June 24, 2010, and combined footage shot then and submitted to YouTube by anyone willing to participate in the crowd-sourced film. Even shrunk to one day, the numbers were staggering: 80,000 videos were uploaded, nearly 4,500 hours of footage.
The result, a slip of a movie at 95 minutes that opens Friday in the United States, offers a look at how a strong directorial guide can create a story out of all the disparate threads of life.
The film came about as a partnership between YouTube and brothers Ridley and Tom Scott, one of whom made a little film called “Gladiator.” The production team chose Kevin Macdonald, director of “The Last King of Scotland,” to oversee the project. Even though it may be hundreds of people telling their stories, the film is strongly Macdonald’s vision.
In most Hollywood films, the emotional climax often rides in on a wave of good feeling thanks to a stirring shot of a crowd coming together and recognizing their common humanity. Imagine that and multiple it by a thousand crowds. Macdonald never lets us forget the sheer number of people coming together on the day of filming, unified only by an online submission plan and the act of recording their lives. The world is shrunk, locations and countries cease to exist; it is simply people living their lives on, as a drunken man avows in an opening scene, the best day ever.
The film switches between fast-paced montages of the mundane — eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom — and short scenes letting the viewer linger on certain lives.
It’s scenes recognizing the humor of humanity that are the most charming. A father teaches his acne-faced son to shave; the boy lathers his nose as his father laughs behind the camera. A child is born, and the camera grows shakier and shakier until it goes into freefall — the new father has fainted.
Macdonald is trumpeting the “we are one” message that Coca-Cola has relied on as an advertising shtick for decades. However, just when the movie veers into saccharine territory, a scene so honestly raw will pull it away from the edge.
A boy cries, frustrated by his parents’ filming, but the quiet undercurrent tells the audience it’s really his mother’s unnamed cancer he’s crying about. A young man documents his attempt to charm a friend into loving him, first asking his mother for advice, later telling the girl and then admitting alone to the camera: “I asked if there was a possibility of a possibility. She said no.”
Macdonald slips up only occasionally, when he allows the unwieldy material to be in control. For example, before the shooting started, Macdonald asked potential participants three questions as a guide: what do you love, what do you have in your pocket and what do you fear? After receiving such a wealth of footage, Macdonald could have dropped the questions or woven them more seamlessly into the day. Instead, almost as if he feels contractually obligated to show the questions he originally asked, the answers crop up about halfway through the film without explanation. Moments like that detract from the fluidity of vision.
Wrangling the online crowd is still a new process, although there are other artists doing it. “The Johnny Cash Project” pieced together a music video out of thousands of 15-second video clips created by fans of the late singer. Kutiman, an Israeli musician, scoured YouTube for clips of solitary musicians and laced together their songs — here a guitar player, there a drummer, there a singer — until he created new songs out of their work, enough for an entire online album called “Thru You.”
“Life in a Day” is the logical next step, stitching together a movie worthy of being seen in a theater. Macdonald is not alone in making that move. “One Day on Earth,” filmed on Oct. 10, 2010, but conceived before “Life in a Day,” has not yet released its own feature film, sourced from 15,400 people, and it already has plans for another day of simultaneous filming on Nov. 11.
“Life in a Day,” while looking like a gorgeous experiment now, probably won’t seem that revolutionary for very long. Likewise, the YouTube logo, so tiny on the computer screen, may soon be looming large more frequently on movie-theater screens.