City students shoot and upload clips on YouTube for a Hollywood film
Mumbai-based engineering students Pankaj Rai (22) has never made films. Yet, on July 31, he uploaded to YouTube five short clips about his daily life that he'd directed and edited.
They were his entries for the life in a Day (LIAD) campaign, organised by the video streaming Website, in collaboration with filmmakers Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald. "It is on July 24, the shooting day, when I captured my life on film, that I realised what I actually go through every day. It had a purpose," Rai says.
Films your day
The Life in a Day campaign closed its registrations on July 31. The initiative presented an opportunity for people to shoot an entire day's activities and contribute to a movie, soon to be directed by Scott and Macdonald.
The best uploaded footage will be included in the longer film, which opens at the Sundance Film Festival, 2011. The winning filmmakers will be credited as co-directors alongside the duo.
On the final day, video uploads had been recorded at a little over six million, and viewership of the LIAD channel had gone up to almost 19 million. A spokesperson from Google says that while the exact number of participants from India could not be ascertained, a survey shows that the site gets over 15 million Indian viewers per day.
The organisers contacted Agra-based technology columnist Amit Agarwal (33), a week before the shooting day to make a promotional video for the campaign.
[This makes it possible to contribute to a film made by big guys like Scott and MacDonald.]
Content is King
"My video was about what I do daily. It's great because there will be a million clips with the same content, all presented in a different form," Agarwal says. The campaign, Agarwal believes, puts creativity above everything else, and aims at using these clips to convey a universal idea. "This initiative made it possible for normal people to contribute to a film directed by big guys like Scott and MacDonald," he adds.
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