A life in the day... how the world sees itself

And that’s precisely what filmmakers Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald wanted people to document when they urged them to film their everyday existence and submit the footage to YouTube to be considered for a feature film.

The project that emerged was Life in a Day. For co-producer Jack Arbuthnott and editor Joe Walker it meant trawling through more than 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries, laboriously logging each piece of footage and then compiling what can only be described as a wonderfully energetic portrait of real life.

The end result is overwhelmingly uplifting. Couldn’t they have found anything negative? Arbuthnott laughs. “People didn’t shoot anything negative,” he reveals.

“The biggest problem was that generally people shot very life-enhancing stuff. We had no preconception what the structure or the narrative would be – we had no idea what was going to come our way. So when we were looking at it we always thought we’d try and go from light to dark. The only thing we knew that was very dark, that happened on the day, was the terrible tragedy in Duisburg. We knew 19 people had died. A lot of that material came in and that’s quite disturbing, but genuinely there wasn’t anything else.”

Arbuthnott is referring to the crush at the Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany, in which hundreds of people crammed into a tunnel. The whole unpleasant episode is caught on camera. That, along with the slaughter of a cow, is the only moment in Life in a Day that is remotely unsettling.

“Lots of people have reacted to the cow being slaughtered. It seemed somehow hypocritical not to include something so common in the film. An agriculture student was in Bologna filming that and submitted it. It’s not what you would expect to find on YouTube, we had to put it in.

“It’s a really strange coincidence: the cow is being slaughtered in Bologna and the next shot is of a man eating bolognaise who is also in Bologna. We always wondered whether it was the same herd.”

The filmmakers’ original intent was to seek answers to four questions: what do you love, what do you fear, what makes you laugh, what’s in your pocket? They feared receiving lots of “shallow nonsense” but were astonished by the content that came their way.

For director Macdonald, a devotee of 1940s documentarian Humphrey Jennings, it was about a time capsule of the mundane.

“I’ve never heard of anything quite like it,” says Arbuthnott. “We were told that we might get 800 hours of material. We ended up with 4,500 hours.

“We couldn’t tell at the beginning what the film was going to be. I could have made a 24-hour film of feet, because so many people filmed their feet. You could make a film devoted to watermelons.

“We logged everything. If I needed a shot of a chicken and a nun in Bolivia, I could find that. It’s global but there’s a very British humour to it.”

Life in a Day (12A) is released on June 17.