From our polymath friend Pacing the Panic Room comes word of a new documentary that is looking for, I suppose, contributors: One Day on Earth. October 10 of this year (10/10/10!) will be documented from Amazonia to Athens by everything from FlipVideo to those fancy Avatar cameras, I presume, in an effort to capture the human experience in a single 24-hour cycle. More information, and a trailer, directly from his blog.
I can’t quite decide whether this is a video editor’s greatest dream or worst nightmare: trying to cull a movie from thousands of broadly solicited, undoubtedly shaky-cam, clips. And then using that edit to make a statement about the Human Condition. But you have to applaud the ambition.
And I myself was serially changed by those coffee-table books that were in vogue in the 1980s, the Day in the Life series. Editors Rick Smolan and David Cohen would bring together 200 photojournalists to capture a single day in some country or state. They photographed America on May 2, 1986, in the book that I had growing up. It’s a simple construct (repeated for other countries and other decades—and about to be repeated again in May, according to the New York Times), but the photography was rich and extremely appealing. Without putting myself on the couch too much, my exposure to the series may well have something to do with the way I signed on as a writer at a magazine whose real strength, if we’re being honest, is often its photography. On a lot of the stories I’ve written, I remember some of the images better than my own writing (shout-out here to David, Shane, Samantha, Yuri, Keith, Ken, Kadir, Thomas, Jon, Andrew and all the rest: you guys freaking rock).
So my advice: get in touch with Pacing the Panic Room or the filmmakers. Be part of something that looks like it could be pretty cool.