YouTube and Sundance have partnered on various projects in the past, but on Saturday the two are launching what they say is their most ambitious pairing yet.
That’s when their documentary, “Life in a Day,” both begins and ends filming.
“This is a new frontier project,” John Cooper, director of the Sundance Film Festival, told TheWrap. “It’s challenging what story and film can be.”
What has Cooper so enthused is not that the project is being produced by Ridley Scott (“Blade Runner”) and directed by Kevin MacDonald (“The Last King of Scotland”). It’s that neither one of the two big-ticket moviemakers are doing any of the actual filming.
In an unprecedented move, they are using the concept of crowd sourcing to make a picture. Instead of sending MacDonald and a crew of more seasoned film folk out across the globe, the pair arae soliciting footage shot by YouTube users that capture their activities over the course of a single day. MacDonald, who is credited as the film’s director, will then cut the best of the submissions into a single documentary.
It's a similar concept to the popular "A Day in the Life" series of books, which captured a 24 hour-span in various countries. The only exception being that those were shot by professional photojournalists.
In fact, the creator of those books, Rick Smolan, was enlisted to expand the project’s reach beyond YouTube users, sending 650 Fuji HD cameras to 40 countries around the world to get footage from remote areas where internet access is scarce or nonexistent. (Camera distribution in Ghana, right.)
“They understood that if they only had YouTube users contribute their slices of daily life, they’d have a very narrow sampling of people who went online,” says Smolan. “So we used our network to get cameras to people on the other side of the world, and the other side of the digital divide.”
“Life in a Day” will have its world premiere at the Park City, Utah, film festival.
Festival organizers and YouTube executives believe that the project is indicative of a new model of no-budget filmmaking and gorilla distribution. For YouTube, it also represents an attempt to get into the content game.
“This really is an effort to expand the YouTube brand,” Anna Richardson, a spokesperson for YouTube, told TheWrap. “We’re going to start filling a void, as more people look to and consider us to distribute their products. Maybe indie filmmakers will see ‘Life in a Day’ as a bridge between filmmaking and distribution.”
The YouTube users who get selected won’t get paid for their efforts, but they do earn a co-director credit. Twenty of their number will be picked to attend the movie’s Sundance premiere.
The movie will be offered free on YouTube simultaneously with its premiere, and the company plans to do a series of screenings around the world.
