YouMovie

It was inevitable, perhaps, that somebody would attempt to crowdsource a movie. Who better than YouTube, in collaboration with Oscar-winning documentary director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) and Producer Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner)?

The team is creating "Life in a Day" -- a film experiment that is asking YouTube users from around the world to upload short, nonfiction video clips of their lives to a designated channel on YouTube. The goal: to create a user-generated, feature-length, content-driven documentary -- which Macdonald will stitch together into a video collage representing one 24-hour period of human life on the planet. The film will premiere on YouTube, for free, on the same day the film debuts at next year's Sundance Film Festival. Scott's production company will own the rights to the final film.

According to The Wall Street Journal's "Digits" blog, Macdonald has hired 10 multi-lingual editors to help filter the good stuff from the dross and start cataloging user clips for review. And here's the good part: to help spur the creativity of the crowd, Scott is distributing 500 free video cameras to NGOs and nonprofits in 20 countries and "areas on the wrong side of the digital divide" to ensure a multitude of diverse voices are represented.

The concept for the film isn't new: The "A Day in the Life" photo projects published earlier in the decade by leading magazines featured images shot on a single day by various photographers working in multiple locations around the world. Macdonald also told The Washington Post that to prepare for the project, he also studied the Mass Observation Project, which was a project in England in the 1930s that assembled diary entries and opinions of 500 citizens to create a document of the era.

It's also not the first time that YouTube has been involved in a crowdsourcing experiment. Last year, the company partnered with Carnegie Hall to assemble 96 of some of the best musicians on YouTube and got them to play together, offline, in the famous concert hall. But unlike the YouTube Symphony, whose members were determined by an online vote, the YouTube movie will be Macdonald's creative production.

Macdonald told Digits: "Like a lot of filmmakers, I'm very anxious about the Internet because we see the piracy and people stealing our ideas and well, putting them on YouTube, and that's going to destroy the film industry like it destroyed the music industry. This YouTube documentary we're making is the flip side of that. It's about what's really positive about the Internet and the creativity that only the Internet is capable of."

Listen up, citizen videographers. Macdonald says he is specifically looking for video clips submitted on July 24 -- the "day" in the life he is choosing to curate. For more information about the project, watch this video:

Pangea Day

At the Skoll Foundation's annual think-fest for social entrepreneurs at Oxford University a few weeks ago, Ken Brecher, a social anthropologist and executive director of the Sundance Institute—organizers of the annual Sundance film festival—defined good storytelling as an increasingly powerful tool for social change globally. "...Storytelling is the refusal to be laid low, incapacitated; it helps us to understand the meaning of things, not simply the value...The purpose of a good storytelling," he said, "is to assist us all to understand and to operate in the open and not wildly in the dark."

To be sure, documentary film—images, captured words, sounds—is the premier art form in today's globalizing world, Brecher believes: it is the medium of the moment. "At any one time," he says, "there is only one art form that is speaking. Once it was dance, then it was poetry, then the short story. Today it is film, and it feels to me that we need to make that connection now if we really want to see change happen in the world."

Indeed. This blog, Cause Global, is a new blog—one that will cover this art form-of-the-moment and the connections it makes (and attempts to make) globally. Ultimately, this blog will track some of the news and ideas and people in today's world who are seeking to use social media to to make a difference, affect change, and use the Web to make solutions to common social problems profitable—and real. Why this? I'm a journalist, and for me it's all about covering the unlikely alliances and conversations that serve as catalysts to social change and problem-solving around common challenges. Storytelling is a big part of today's social change movement—one that packs the emotional resonance to cut through the noise of everyday media. "In storytelling," says Brecher, "you have to incline the ears of your heart."

Storytelling moves to the masses this spring with Pangea Day, documentary filmmaker Jenhane Noujaim's 2006 TED Festival dream-come-true. Noujaim, whose 2004 film, Control Room, exposed the divergent ways Arabs and the West covered the onset and outbreak of the Iraq war, is one of the catalysts behind this spring's globally-produced Pangea Day, scheduled for May 10. The live event is planned as a simulcast of films, speakers, and music; sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live that day to produce a 4-hour program, which will air on the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Raised in both Egypt and the United States, Noujaim says her aim is to explore culture as a driving force for both conflict and possibility. "I want to use the power of film to bridge gaps between people," she says. "...How are people supposed to communicate with each other globally...or move together into the future...when their stories aren't being told?"

What do you think? Check out the official trailer for Pangea Day HERE.