LIFE IN A DAY by RIDLEY SCOTT (SHORT FILM BRIEF)

As part of our research into the short film genre, we studied Ridley Scott's Life in a Day (dir. Kevin McDonald, 2011) from an artistic and institutional point of view.

• It is a striking example of a crowd-sourced film as it results from Ridley Scott's invitation to people around the world to contribute video taken on one single day, 24 July 2010
• This method of production illustrates the trend of consumers as producers which new technologies such as Web 2.0 have enabled.
• For Michael Wesch, this illustrates what he calls 'participatory culture' as this video explains.
• Distribution for this short film was unusual as it went straight to YouTube, free of charge, but with conventional P & A in the form of posters.
• Convergence, the coming together of a variety of technologies in one platform, is exemplified in the production practices of this short film. 
• Wikipedia: Macdonald expressed to The Wall Street Journal that the film "could only be made in the last five years because ... you can get enough people who will have an understanding of how to shoot something."^[18] Film editor Joe Walker told Wired magazine's Angela Watercutter that the film "couldn't have been made without technology. Ten years ago it would've been impossible."^[19] Macdonald explained that YouTube "allowed us to tap into a pre-existing community of people around the world and to have a means of distributing information about the film and then receiving people's 'dailies.' It just wouldn't have been organizationally or financially feasible to undertake this kind of project pre-YouTube."^[19]
  The filmmaking team “used YouTube's ability to collect all of this material and then we had this sort of sweatshop of people, all multilingual film students, to sift through this material. It couldn't have been done any other way. Nobody had ever done a film like this before, so we had to sort of make it up as we went along.”^[19]