YouTube's "Life in a Day" project is an ambitious filmmaking exercise in which thousands of people around the world document their lives, and some film industry veterans cut, chop, and paste all that footage into a coherent documentary. It's a monumental challenge, but the names attached--most importantly Ridley Scott, serving as executive producer, and Kevin MacDonald (director of The Last King of Scotland, not the similarly named member of Kids in the Hall)--provide some reassurance that maybe, just maybe, the film won't suck.

The footage, all of which was shot on Saturday, July 24th, comes from 197 countries and is in 45 languages, and totals over 80,000 separate videos. And today, you can get a feel for the huge task in front of Scott and MacDonald, because Google just put all the videos online.

LG is also aboard as a partner, curating a separate section called "Smile" that highlights "positive and inspiring" videos. It's cheesy, as is LG's official statement (which is little more than the repetition of the company's slogan, with a few filler words for syntax), but it's not a bad idea. In fact, Google allows the filtering of videos by mood, including "thoughtful," "depressed," "excited," and "lonely," so you can exclusively watch videos of lonely people, if that's your weird thing.

The film itself is being constructed now, and will premiere simultaneously at Sundance and on YouTube in January 2011.

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