Life in a Day - Entry 1

Starting in Semester 2, we have watched a documentary called Life in a Day. The documentary shows how different people around the world do different activities throughout their day. It takes place on the 24th of July, 2010, from 12 AM in the morning all the way to 12 AM the next day. The film is around 90 minutes long. What's unique about this documentary is that it was a collaborative project between thousands of people around the world with varying skills of cinematography. It mixes a variety of camera shots, angles, techniques, lighting, etc. While there are some inconsistencies between the clips, it somehow flows together quite well, mostly due to the work of the editor and director.

The process of creating Life in A Day was a long one, according to many sources. First they had to come up with a theme to tie everything together. The theme came in the form of 3 questions: "What do you love?",  "What do you fear?" and "What's in your pocket?". There were thousands of hours worth of footage from different countries and the editors and director had to view most, if not, all of them to see which ones fit best. After assembling the video together, they had to edit transitions, effects and music. Finally, they chose to publish it on YouTube. The most likely reason they chose to upload it on YouTube rather than show it in a cinema is so that it could reach a broader audience, because YouTube is the most popular video sharing platform on the internet, and also so people could watch it for free, any time they want.

In this semester, we will be carrying over our skills from last semester, working individually to create our own "Life in a Day". Each student gets an hour of a certain time period to record themselves doing something they normally do, while making it interesting. So far, each student made an oral analysis of a certain scene of choice from Life in A Day. The scene I chose was the ending scene where the woman talks about how dull her day had been. In this project, we will be going through a similar process of pre-production, production, and post-production. This time, however we will also be making storyboards to make production easier.

For my part in the project, I will be recording from 1-2 PM. My initial plan was to shoot during school time, in the middle of a lesson. But after some consideration, I decided against it for a few reasons; It may bother the class, and the teacher may not allow me to shoot at all. So, I decided to shoot during a lunch time on Friday because on Fridays lunch happens on 1-2. After making this decision, I made a simple storyboard.

However, on Saturday, February 13, I was getting surgery on my ear. I realized that I could do the shooting then. So, I made another storyboard in case I could shoot in the hospital.

However, in the end, I couldn't film the surgery, and only filmed myself after the surgery.

After finishing the storyboards, the next thing we worked on was presenting tutorials on either aesthetics or technical skills. In my case, I chose aesthetic because I am confident in my technical abilities in shooting video.

I believe there were some things I could have improved on. The planning stage could have been improved to give a better idea of what I wanted to do. The shoot I did so far also could have better quality, but due to several factors I couldn't make some aspects like lighting, framing and sound as good as I hoped, which is a shame especially since it was a one-time opportunity.