Amateur and small-scale professional films have proliferated on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, allowing for an expansion of voices and perspectives through centralized online services. As a result of this shift, media corporations have begun to engage producers and audiences as sources for inexpensive crowdsourced material. The first major United States motion picture to engage crowdsourced labor for production is the film Life in a Day, a film sponsored by LG and YouTube (a subsidiary of Google, Inc.) and spearheaded by executive producer Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator) through his production company, Scott Free. The production, a global “day in the life” video experiment, leverages the YouTube platform and its worldwide network of media producers. This distribution of labor to inexpensive, unpaid videographers contributes to a new mode of filmmaking and introduces questions of how the film industry will bring crowdsourced labor into the traditional production model. Will the legacy of this experiment be a celebration of a monumental global achievement or a sad memory of crowdsourced labor exploitation by Hollywood heavyweights and social media giants?

Life in a Day was released for one day on YouTube and will be released worldwide on July 24, 2011. The film itself, frankly, is beautifully crafted, tightly edited and surprisingly touching. Macdonald and his team of editors, led by acclaimed film editor Joe Walker, scoured through the footage to cobble together a film running just shy of 95 minutes. Despite relying almost exclusively on amateur footage, the experienced team of filmmakers managed to assemble a tale of humanity depicted at the heights of its beauty and at the depths of its ugliness.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The positivistic notion of online creative collaboration and the “wisdom of the crowd” tends to obscure, minimize or ignore the question of labor practices and power. Jeff Howe, the Wired contributor noted for coining the term “crowdsourcing”, defines the practice as an effort to bring together dispersed collaborators on a problem, typically a creative problem encountered by corporations or organizations. Daren Brabham challenges this notion by exposing the myth of crowdsourcing by citing examples of poorly- and well-executed crowdsourcing projects and professional works masquerading as amateur productions. Often, an “undefined, large group” of laborers fades into the background as the easily observable benefits of the crowdsourcing model move to the forefront: more voices, more ideas, and a questionable notion of “democratic” media.

Robert Gehl, in “YouTube as Archive,” argues that power on YouTube is concentrated not with the common individual contributor but with powerful companies positioned to exploit individual labor in the mass marketplace. Contributors to Life in a Day agreed to YouTube’s terms of service to upload their footage and willfully exchanged their rights to their work for their shot at being included in the film.

Contrary to the apprehension of the filmmakers, contributors jumped at the opportunity to find their footage associated with this unprecedented social media experiment. The director, Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, The Last King of Scotland) announced the project on July 6, 2010, asking videographers worldwide to capture footage from their daily lives on the date of 24 July 2010 (cleverly 24-7).

Click here to view the embedded video.

The YouTube community overwhelmingly responded to the call for videos. Submissions came from nearly every country in the world. To ensure adequate representation across both developed and developing nations, the production team commissioned video cameras for distribution where the technology might not be readily available or affordable. When the call for submissions closed on July 31, 2010, the legion of volunteer YouTube videographers had submitted an astonishing 4500 hours of footage in 80,000 clips from 140 nations to the Life in a Day YouTube channel. The complete, edited film features more than 1,000 clips from YouTube contributors.

How were the videographers compensated for their contributions? Each submitter whose clip appeared in the film received a “co-director” credit in the final release. That’s it. Importantly, YouTube’s Terms of Service indicate that all video content uploaded to YouTube remains owned by the uploading site member. The Life in a Day project tacked on an additional Terms of Service for any clip selected for inclusion in the film’s release. The combined Terms of Service establish full force of legal protections, absolving YouTube and the Life in a Day project from any requirements to compensate videographers.1

The Life in a Day project imposed heavy restrictions on the content based on whether the clip contributed to the final film print. For each selected clip, Life in a Day Films requested release forms requiring the signature of every person appearing in a selected video. The contributor also signed releases concerning the use of the video in the film and related activities such as marketing, promotions, and absolution of liability.

Contributors received no monetary payment for contributing or being selected. Furthermore, the Terms and Conditions of the Life in a Day project grants Life in a Day Films the right to include a user’s video in the film “and to exploit the film in all media forever.” The co-directors gain no compensation or rights to future compensation for the film. In short, YouTube users captured up to 24 hours of footage without compensation and submitted the footage to the Life in a Day project. Scott Free productions, indeed, stands to profit without compensating the videographers for their labor.

The Life in a Day project seemed destined to receive critical and popular praise due to the breadth of its undertaking and the quality of the film. This successful and astounding crowdsourcing experiment undoubtedly will be recognized for its contribution to the film industry as a reflection of a new era of production and as a masterfully directed and edited narrative. My purpose here is simply to introduce the question of whether the videographers contributing to Life in a Day received sufficient compensation for their contributions to a major film release or fell victim to exploitative practices.

In a fair exchange of compensation for services provided and resources used, does Hollywood really expect free labor to be happy merely with seeing their name in lights? July 24, 2011, will be payday for the filmmakers. For the sources comprising the undefined “crowd”, it will be just another day in the life.

Special thanks to R. Colin Tait for his thoughtful notes on this piece.

Image Credits:
All images captured by the author.

Please feel free to comment.

1. I would like to read the full, executed contract between a co-director and Life in a Day Films and would appreciate any leads a reader might suggest!

Online audience voting (and its telephone and text messaging counterparts) has become the de facto extension of television’s push to engage and promote an active audience. Dating back to the initial rise of reality television contests such as American Idol, audience voting via phone and text messaging has been a major component of the feedback generated by television producers to verify viewer engagement. Now, as studios adapt to the challenges of engaging Internet-savvy audiences, online voting has become a mainstay of the feedback loop. A new contest from OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network offers a case study of how underground Internet communities can rally behind certain contestants and bolster votes through both human and automated methods.

OWN, launching 1/1/2011, is Oprah Winfrey’s next endeavor and will undoubtedly be the cornerstone of her media empire after her syndicated program, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” ceases production in September, 2011. Winfrey’s new channel is dedicated to growing a ”new network, a network of people who are all interested in reaching their greatest potential.”1 Formerly Discovery Health, OWN aspires to “[connect] you to your best self and to the world.”2

One of the strategies for generating audience engagement for the OWN network is the “Your OWN Show” contest, which seeks individuals interested in hosting an inspirational program on the network. Contestants could either attend a casting call in-person or submit a video online. The producers selected the winners at the live casting calls, while the online video contest relied on video views and audience votes. In the online battleground for popular votes, the “new network” of Oprah viewers collided with another strong network of active media audience members: Internet communities 4chan and Reddit, and celebrity fan communities on blogs and social networking sites. As the contest heated up, two contestants, Zach Anner and Dr. Phyllis, roused suspicion as to the validity and verifiability of the computer users behind the votes. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Between the dates of June 11 to June 14, Zach Anner caught the attention of several Internet communities and gained notoriety quite quickly over the course of that weekend. Anner, who has cerebral palsy (in his words, “the sexiest of the palsies”), entered a video into the contest in which he describes his idea for a travel show, revealing a glimmering sense of humor in front of the camera. 

Anner’s wit, charm and energy are compelling to watch, and it is likely that his submission would have received a large portion of the popular vote. However, his rise to prominence and fame occurred suspiciously over the course of a few short days. The numbers are staggering: his video, submitted on June 2, 2010 had amassed a respectable 3,000 votes by June 11. But by daybreak on June 14, Internet users had rallied behind Zach and had rung up a whopping 2,000,000 votes, propelling the obscure Anner into the top spot on the OWN results board. 

How did Anner, a relatively obscure figure, rise to such prominence so quickly? As with many of the web’s most notorious culture hacking incidents, the first suspect is the 4chan message board community. 4chan, widely known for its questionable content and anonymity, immediately becomes “Public Enemy #1″ in any incidents where technology can be manipulated for both positive and nefarious purposes.3 4chan, by design, is not safe for work, popular taste or decorum. Another web community, Reddit, tends to pick up on memes generated on 4chan and brings the topics to an ever-so-slightly more civilized, yet still anonymous, audience. Zach Anner’s audition video was first posted on Reddit on June 124 followed by a post on Digg July 13. Through active promotion across several web sites featuring user-generated content, a concentrated effort on the part of Reddit and 4chan users quickly set the stage for Anner’s ascent.

Community members began encouraging users to vote as often as humanly and mechanically possible for Anner. Some users helped boost the results with an automated script to submit as many votes as possible within a specified time period, and the script was shared with other tech-savvy communities. This behavior may violate the contest rules, which state, “Use of any computer auto-voting software … intended to tamper with the proper functioning of the voting system … is strictly prohibited and all such votes will be void.” Since the script only mimicked user behavior, would votes for Anner be recognized as valid or would he slide back into obscurity?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fortunately for Anner, his video gained the attention of Internet-savvy celebrity John Mayer. Mayer, with 3.4 million followers on Twitter and a legion of fans, likely is a perfect bridge from the underground nature of web forums to the public nature of celebrity life. Mayer posted the video to his web site as a re-blog of an article featured on “The Daily What” (part of the Cheezburger Network famous for its LOLCats) and parsed through another aggregator, MetaFilter. The call-and-response video exchange between Anner and Mayer lit the Internet on fire, securing Anner’s lead for the short term.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How, then, did Dr. Phyllis reach the high vote totals evident on the OWN results site? Her video was posted on May 18 (approximately two weeks before Anner’s video) and gained support rather quickly, but it fell behind as other videos gained popularity. Suddenly, in the middle of June, Dr. Phyllis’ video enjoyed a 300,000 vote surge in the matter of a few moments, prompting an outcry from 4chan and Reddit, among others, that the voting process had been compromised. Savvy Internet users quickly mobilized to find evidence of voting fraud and to document the incident. One site in particular, Geekosystem, assembled a large body of evidence to illustrate how voter fraud could be occurring. 

Despite these allegations, Dr. Phyllis and four other contestants (all of whom likely were bolstered by voting scripts circulated through the Internet) emerged as the winners of the contest and are moving on to the next phase of the competition. OWN, in what seems to be an acknowledgement of the turbulent voting process, selected three contestants, including Anner, to “join the other finalists.”5 At the end of the voting, Zach Anner received 9,161,042 votes (1,338,662 views), while Dr. Phyllis received 8,250,748 votes (2,230,290 views). Curiously, the final results as filtered by OWN reveal that Dr. Phyllis, in 2nd place, received 8,453,803 votes while Zach, in 7th place, finished with a mere 3.4 million votes.

OWN’s very own website reveals significant inconsistencies in the reported results of the contest, raising challenging questions that impact the validity and trust in Winfrey’s new media property. Why did Anner’s total decline so rapidly while Dr. Phyllis’ total remained unchanged? To what degree did Internet scripts manipulate the votes? Did all of the finalists use scripts to promote their videos? Without proof, followers of the OWN contest are left to wonder how the voting process had been manipulated by the producers of OWN or by savvy Internet programmers. Ultimately, it is unlikely that the audience will ever know the extent of vote tampering.

Image Credits:

1. Author screen capture from OWN, accessed 7/14/2010
2. Author screen capture from OWN, accessed 7/14/2010
3. Author screen capture from OWN, accessed 7/14/2010
4. Author screen capture from OWN, accessed 7/14/2010

Please feel free to comment.

1. What is OWN?
2. Ibid.
3. 4chan is  responsible for the recent ballot-stuffing incident to send Justin Bieber to North Korea. http://gawker.com/5577433/the-plot-to-send-justin-bieber-to-north-korea 
4. I was unable to find a 4chan post dating back to the June time frame since 4chan does not archive its forums.
5. It is unclear as to whether the three additional contestants will be included as winners or will receive some other treatment on the premiere. OWN