Documentaries are gaining immense notoriety these days. Even my local video store has taken the time to negotiate documentary titles out of the genre muck and onto their own special rack.
It may be the supernova of reality TV that has tuned folks in to a new found passion for independent documentary filmmakers, but regardless of how it came to be, documentaries offer us a broad category of visual expression that is based solely on a bias of that filmmaker. It is the attempt to document reality—one with an unassuming agenda.
Add the technological advancements of the last year or so to this mix and you’ve got a documentary pandemic on your hands. Every person on the planet is now a budding videographer; director and producer with endless amounts of open forum and tell-all creativity bursting forth from their over-saturated senses.
Oh, yeah! That’s entertainment folks!
It was only a matter of time before someone pieced the two together in a big crowd-sourced kind of way. The Beastie Boys kicked it off in 2006 with their “Awesome; I F*ckin’ Shot That!” documentary on DVD after giving camcorders to 50 audience members of their sold-out concert in 2004 in Madison Square Gardens. The mandate was to shoot everything and don’t stop rolling.
Fast forward to present day and we’re sitting tight waiting for the release date of Director, Kevin MacDonald, and Producer, Ridley Scott’s documentary, “The Story of a Single Day on Earth.” These boys decided to crowd-source videos through YouTube, asking users around the globe to submit their own videos of their life on one specific day—July 24, 2010—providing a snap-shot of that one day on earth from the different perspectives.
Life in a Day will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27th as well as a special YouTube debut on the same date at 8pm EST. It’s going to be a fascinating experiment on the new age of social film-making. Follow the countdown at http://www.youtube.com/lifeinaday#p/u.
Maybe you’ll see the uberscribbler rolling out of bed at sunrise. 😉
~uberscribbler
UberScribbler 