Life in a Day: Real and powerful, Filmmakers’ arrangement in storytelling
One day in the whole life is as common as a water drop, but what if putting together what people have done around the world during this day, which must be substantial and powerful. Comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions, from 192 nations, that submitted to YouTube. The documentary film, Life in a day, showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, 24 July 2010.
The documentary Life in a Day raises three questions: What’s in your pocket? What do you love? and What do you fear? These are simple questions, but they made me think for a while. The filmmakers classified and re-edited the numerous clips together, making the seemingly boring life a wonderful one.
The first ten minutes of the film edited different clips of human and animals’ awaking, cooperated with sunrise on deck and grand symphony, showing the day in the whole life is normal but vigorous. The film also put together the birth of a new life; a Japanese boy Tae Sung awakened by his father to offer incense to her mother; The first time for a 15-year-old boy to shave his face and bled; a Vietnamese servant with a large basket on her head, to celebrate the Vishnu ceremony; and a grandfather expresses deep gratitude to those who take care of him after a surgery…etc.
This documentary makes me in awe of life and learn to cherish every day. One clip recorded by a father: his wife in the bed with cancer recurrence. Dad said to his inexplicable boy that this family project (shooting a family video) was a happy film and has a happy ending. In answering his wife’s question, what does he fear most, he said, “I am fearless now.” “It was my fear that you get cancer, and then I’m afraid of your cancer recurs. Now, I just hope you alive.” The health of the whole family is the greatest happiness. This film is true, in our daily life, so, it is powerful.
In the Documentary Storytelling: Creative Nonfiction on Screen, the author Sheila Curran Bernard said, “…factuality alone does not define documentary films; it’s what the filmmaker does with those factual elements, artfully weaving them into an overall narrative that is often greater than the sum of its parts.” In Life in a Day, I felt such selection and arrangement in finding and expressing a main goal of a day in the life, and I felt the filmmakers’ thoughts.
Director Macdonald said that the film focused on a single day “because a day is the basic temporal building block of human life—wherever you are.” The editor, Joe Walker, said that, “We always wanted to have a number of structures, so it’s not just midnight to midnight, but it’s also from light to dark and from birth to death.”
At the end of the film, a girl who started recording at 4 minutes left in this day. She said, although nothing special happened today, she felt like she had experienced a wonderful night. Thunder and lightning flashed in the sky, heavy downpour outside her window. This is the end of this day, 24 July 2010 in the world, a person’s “life in a day” will start again, in another day, before sunrise.
Reference:
Watercutter, Angela, “Life in a Day Distills 4,500 Hours of Intimate Video Into Urgent Documentary” (WebCite archive), Wired magazine, 29 July 2011
