I recently watched “Life in a Day,” a montage consisting of video clips submitted by people from all over the world through YouTube. It’s a unique and fascinating video that you can view here:
Here’s a brief description from Wikipedia:
Life in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010. The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations.
As I watched the many clips featuring so many people, it first occurred to me how “different” we are from each other. As the video continued, though, what became overwhelming is, despite the superficial differences, we are all substantially and deeply similar, regardless of where we live and regardless how we dress and what we eat.
In other words, the powerful undercurrent of “Life in a Day” is the lesson taught by Donald Brown, that human animals are incredibly similar to each other. And see here. Brown once asked, “The world’s cultures may be diverse, but diverse compared to what?”
Thanks for the “Life in a Day” recommendation. It was often compelling and sometimes moving, and it was also astonishing to think of the editing involved in dealing with all that potential footage.
Mike: I’m glad you enjoyed it too. For me, it’s main message was that the world is much bigger than me. Every day I trudge through my own tiny slice of the world, interacting with a few, or a few dozen people. It’s tempting to focus on only this tiny subset of what’s going on as the ONLY thing that is important. “Life in a Day” was a good antidote to that temptation. And yes, that was quite an impressive editing job. Thanks for writing . . .