On July 24, 2010, YouTube invited its community to participate in a feature-length film project that became Life in a Day, which drew 80,000 submissions, premiered at Sundance in 2011, was released globally in theaters and has been watched on YouTube over 16 million times.
Nearly 10 years to the date—Saturday, July 25—the Google-owned video site is doing it again.
Executive producers Kai Hsuing (Lords of Chaos) and Ridley Scott (Gladiator, The Martian) and director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, One Day in September, Whitney) are helming Life in a Day 2020.
YouTube said in a blog post, “Maybe you’ll be filming from home as you continue to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, or maybe you’re in a part of the world where you’re figuring out how to move forward in a transformed world. Maybe you’re connecting with friends, reuniting with family or going to work. Maybe it’s a special day—you’re getting married, moving out, sharing important news. Or maybe it’s just a normal day. We want to weave together these unique experiences and perspectives to create a time capsule of this moment.”
Submissions are open from July 25 through Aug. 2, after which the film will be edited over the course of five months, made entirely of the submitted footage.
YouTube said a 30-person team of multilingual reviewers from around the world will review and translate videos that are submitted, and “an enormous postproduction effort” will be undertaken by Macdonald and principal feature editors Nse Asuquo (House of My Fathers, The Jazz Ambassadors), Mdhamiri Á Nkemi (Blue Story, The Pale Horse), and Sam Rice-Edwards (Whitney) “to shape the film’s final narrative out of the submitted footage.”
The company wrote, “While only a small number of the submitted clips will make it into the movie, YouTube and the filmmakers hope the filming day itself becomes a significant day of global participation. The Life in a Day 2020 project celebrates the importance of everyone coming together in a moment of equal, worldwide collaboration.”