What are you doing today? Top film director wants a snapshot of your life

• Film-maker Kevin MacDonald wants to capture one day 'as seen through the eyes of people around the world'. Picture: Getty Images

In the Life in the Day project, the video-sharing website is asking users to submit a snapshot of their lives on a single day - 24 July. Mr MacDonald's job is to edit hundreds, or thousands, of entries into a single film.

"I hope it will be something that will open people's eyes to the possibilities of user-generated film," Mr MacDonald said yesterday. "Of course, it's a risk. It could be that I won't get anything interesting back. But I don't think that will be the case."

The Glasgow-born director, who recently finished filming Scottish-based drama The Eagle of the Ninth, added: "I'm sure there will be some real gems, some real magic, which is what I'm looking for."

Youtube has enlisted another big Hollywood name for the project. Sir Ridley Scott, the creator of Blade Runner, Alien and Gladiator, will work as executive producer.

Youtube, which is owned by the California-based search engine giant Google, called Life in the Day a "historic cinematic experiment" which will capture one day "as seen through the eyes of people around the world".

"You have 24 hours to capture a snapshot of your life on camera," the website said in a blog post. "You can film the ordinary, a sunrise, the commute to work, a neighbourhood soccer match, or the extraordinary, a baby's first steps, your reaction to the passing of a loved one, or even a marriage."

Users will be asked to upload their video by 31 July, with Mr MacDonald overseeing the potentially massive task of editing the material into a coherent, feature-length documentary.

The film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, the leading festival in the United States for independent films, in January next year. It will be streamed simultaneously on YouTube for free.

Those whose footage makes it into the film - who must be at least 13 years old - will be credited as co-directors, and 20 of them will be flown to Sundance for the premiere.

The project follows two previous efforts by the website to draw its enormous user communities - with some 24 hours of footage uploaded on to its servers every minute - into combined projects overseen by professionals with a permanent appeal.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra gathered classical musicians from YouTube with the help of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and composer Tan Dun.

The recently launched YouTube Play saw a partnership with the Guggenheim Museum in Europe to create a "biennial of creative video".

"We really feel that YouTube over the past five years has definitely changed the way that content is created and consumed," said YouTube's film and animation manager, Sara Pollack. "Each of these programs continues to deliver against that - empowering regular people who have visions, who have voices, who have opinions, who have talent."

Mr MacDonald has been inspired in the past by the work of Humphrey Jennings, who in 1937 founded the Mass Observation movement, a long-running social observation project that asked hundreds of volunteers to record their lives in diaries or questionnaires, and also took recordings of people's conversations at work or in meetings. Mr MacDonald made a documentary about Jennings in 2000.

"It's not a mainstream film I'm going to make, it's an experimental film," Macdonald said. "People can contribute to what I hope is going to be a great film by giving something of themselves."

Undaunted by crossing linguistic and cultural barriers in his finished project, he said: "For me, the most important thing is that people are intimate. Honesty is what I want." z