Youtube's Crowdsourced, Social film-making contest for Sundance 2011
Youtube have announced a massive social filmaking project called Life in a Day , aiming to tell a story about what it is like to be alive on 24th July 2010.
It promises to be the biggest social-filmaking venture, not to mention the most ambitious and mainstream example of Crowdsourcing, ever.
They've even got two outstanding filmakers on board to oversee it.
Directing and putting it all together will be Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) and it will be produced by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) and his company Scott Free Productions.
Anyone can contribute - all that is needed is that you capture something about your own particular life on July 24, 2010, on camera, and upload the footage to the Life in a Day channel sometime before July 31.
Footage will be curated and combined into a feature-length film for next year’s Sundance Film Festival.
That means you, your boss or your neigbour's dog could have the chance to show at the prestigious event, and make history while you're at it. If it is yours that's picked it'll be credited as co-directors and 20 of them will be flown to Festival for the world premiere .
LG Entertainment is backing the project as part of the Life’s Good campaign and to support the creation of quality online content.
Hear Ridley Scott give his take:
The sheer scale of the project, the fact that it has even been able to go ahead with such a strong backing, says a lot about where we are now in our ideas about creativity and collaboration.
It also says a lot about what socialised media enables us to achieve online, when we all get together. I'd even go so far as to say that it demonstrates a real shift in how we see creative production as a whole, sourcing footage from the crowd and then using the expert eyes of two film masters to curate the footage and sew it all together into a final piece of work.
It perhaps sets out to overturn one of the biggest oppositions to crowdsourcing as a an approach towards creative. Criticism such as this one outlined in wikipedia, the :
Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale, crowdsourced project.
It is also interesting, how, by sourcing footage from the crowd for a story about life in one day there's the potential to make a profound statement, have a narrative that in it's nature is both internalised and introspecitve but universal all at once.
To put that in a nutshell, Macdonald says this about the project:
“Life In A Day is a time capsule that will tell future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24 July 2010. It’s a unique experiment in social film-making, and what better way to gather a limitless array of footage than to engage the world’s online community.”
All in all, I think everyone agrees this is a phenomenal idea that has every potential to make history - not just for film, but for social creativity too.
via mashable and marketingweek
