As I had hoped I was able to watch "Life in a Day" on my computer at work and was relatively undisturbed for the duration. I wish I could have watched it at home on my TV (even though the highest quality available was 480p) with my blu-ray player streaming YouTube, but there was no way I was going to get home by 5pm (although the film actually started at 5:30pm).
I really enjoyed the film, I thought it was really beautiful and joyful and sad and funny and dark. It really did a good job of evoking the human condition in a beautiful and interesting way. It is chronological, proceeding throughout the day starting with early morning, continuing to breakfast, etc, and it's thematic, dealing with different issues that affect us in our everyday lives as human beings. A few of the participants are threaded throughout the film, but the film does not really follow any particular story lines. It's just a constant discovery of beauty, humor, pathos, and fear in the world. While some of the footage is obviously not very high quality, some of it is very well shot. One of my favorite visual images is the glowing, floating lanterns near the end.
My lasting reaction to the film is that it was a really cool concept and well executed. I really felt like I was participating in an event, merely by watching the film. So kudos to the director and producer as well as Sundance for supporting it. I want to say good job to YouTube too. I didn't experience any interruptions throughout the whole film and I'm sure they must have prepared for the insanity of streaming a film live to millions of people.
I did have some freezing happen while watching. It made me have to refresh the page which started the film over again. Then when I was about three quarters of the way through it stopped and cut to the q and a session.
ReplyDeleteSo I missed the end.
That really sucks. I wonder how it worked for other people. It's worth noting that I had my laptop plugged into the network via ethernet cable, but our internet has been slow lately too, so I figured it about balanced out.
ReplyDelete