A man in Oslo brushing his teeth. A preteen in Vancouver playing an acoustic guitar. A woman in Zimbabwe sowing seeds in a garden near her hut.
These kinds of everyday moments are just the thing YouTube hopes to compile from its millions of users in a documentary called Life in a Day, its first feature-length film.
But these aren't just any moments in any given day. The video website giant is asking people from all over the world to film moments in their life on July 24, 2010, (chosen because the date and month reads 24/7) and submit them to YouTube.
Then Academy Award winning director Kevin Macdonald will pore through the entries and pluck out the moments he feels represent the flavour of global daily life. Ridley Scott, director of Top Gun, Gladiator and Robin Hood, will be the executive producer.
The collaborative project makes sense in a world where millions of people already post their thoughts, feelings and actions online, Sara Pollack, entertainment marketing manager for YouTube, said from Los Angeles.
"It's about the fact that the world now has gotten very comfortable with sharing their lives with other people," she said. "It's a very unique time to create a feature film that kind of brings that to the forefront, hopefully, in a very artistic and experimental way."
Youtube, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in April, has already made successful forays into the world of music, art and film through its YouTube Symphony Orchestra and the YouTube Play partnership with the Guggenheim on video art.
Hundreds of cameras are being distributed by NGOs in developing countries so people who don't typically videotape themselves can participate, Ms. Pollack said.
"[The submissions]could be the extraordinary - a birth, a wedding, anything major in your life, or it could be the totally mundane. You decide what it is."
The film will include clips from all kinds of filmmakers, from professional to the most amateur, she added.
The final product will debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and about 20 people out of thousands whose clips will appear in the documentary will be credited as directors and invited to attend, she said.