Life In A Day is a historic global cinematic experiment aimed at creating a user-generated feature film. On July 24th, you have 24 hours to capture a glimpse of your life on camera. Video submissions will be accepted from July 24th – July 31st. The most compelling submissions will be edited into a documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin MacDonald.

The documentary film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and will also be available on YouTube. If your submission makes it into the finished film, you’ll be credited as a co-director. 20 people will be chosen from the list of co-directors to be flown to the Sundance Film Festival to celebrate the premiere!

For more details on guidelines, ideas and how to submit your video, check out the Life In A Day YouTube channel.

Given the data below there is no question that online video consumption continues to accelerate and with this growth we see that YouTube continues to be the 600-pound gorilla. Along with this trend we will also see an acceleration of marketers evaluating how they can participate in the change in consumer behavior to deliver on their message.

A great example of a brand doing more than just trying to put their :30 second spots online is HP’s YouTube Channel. It does a good job of providing unique content that tells a story about the brand and conncets to the consumer.

The numbers:
Internet users viewed 21.4 Billion online videos in July 2009 alone (comScore)

• Up 31% from 14.8 Billion in January 2009
• 50% coming from the US
• 42% comes from YouTube

YouTube announced that in October that they were serving “well over a billion views a day”.

• In August YouTube had over 104 million viewers in the U.S. alone with over an estimated 350 million globally (Nielsen)
• Hulu was #2 with just over 10 million in the US.

In January of 2009, searches on YouTube in the United States edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. This has driven to the fact that video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S.(NYTimes)

“Imagine a whole generation of kids growing up and learning about the world through YouTube. In the first half of the 20th century, people grew up reading books and newspapers. Then there was a generation that grew up on movies and television. The last shift was to the Internet. And now web video is creating yet another generation. This is different, and powerful.” – ReadWriteWeb

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Image Source: Jonsson