It may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but "Life in a Day" is a prophetic example of where film may be headed. Everything that has surrounded and defined the film industry — studios, locations, directors, casts and theaters — all of these are condensed into two letters: PC. Flip open a laptop and you're in a multiplex; open some apps and you're a director.
"Life in a Day" is a crowdsourcing project: 80,000 submissions from 192 countries were sent in via YouTube, all chronicles of people's lives on July 24, 2010. The team headed by director Kevin Macdonald ("Touching the Void") then spliced, sliced and strung the various footage together to form a 90-minute film experience that offers a window on what it's like to inhabit this planet on one particular day.
There's no voice-over. There's no CGI. Much of the footage is headache-inducing, low-resolution stuff, occasionally alleviated by fragments of clear, pro-quality frames. The soundtrack is an original score by Harry Gregson-Williams and Matthew Herbert, and this is practically the only nod made in the direction of conventional cinema.