After Watching: A Floating Day 2020: When The Individual'S Life Becomes A Glimpse

Liu Ying / Wen

Many years later, how will people look back on 2020? The modern world, which is already highly developed in science and technology, is torn by diseases, and the endless prohibition and social distance stimulate people's desire to communicate with each other. In this special year, no matter where on earth, people are experiencing the same uneasiness and carrying the same dream. This is why, once the "Floating Life Day 2020" project was launched, it was enthusiastically discussed by participants from all over the world.

"Floating Life Day 2020" is not a traditional documentary, its production process is full of gimmicks. The project was initiated by director Kevin MacDonald and produced by the famous Redley Scott. All the material in the film comes from spontaneous contributions, and all the video segments are shot on July 15, 2020. In other words, this is a "proposition composition". More than 320000 videos from 192 countries in the world have been collected in the editing material library. The main creative team selects the appropriate content from such a vast image library, and then clips and processes them, finally creating this 90 minute documentary.

As a matter of fact, collective creation is not a novelty. As early as 2010, the team of "one day of Floating Life" took the lead in soliciting video materials from the outside world, and finally editing into a film, so as to let the audience appreciate the diversity of life in all corners of the world, and more insight into the universality of each life. It can be said that it is a very successful creation. "Floating Life Day 2020" is intended to continue the style of the previous work "tiny but full of moving", but this time the main creative team is facing greater challenges.

One of the challenges, of course, is the doubling of the amount of material. Now is the era of "all citizens are bloggers". Everyone's daily life is immersed in the field of social media. "Cloud sharing" has become a familiar behavior in modern life. How to extract interesting, novel and even meaningful clips from the massive submitted videos? How to arrange and combine these videos into narration by means of editing? None of this is easy. Finally, the film chose the time axis as the relatively simple processing method.

At the beginning of the film, a group of photographers from different countries get up. The time frame is that when the sun rises in the daytime, people wake up from their sleep, or they are tired or excited to start their day's life. With the advancement of the film, the audience can quickly grasp its editing logic. In short, it is to clip together the materials related to the same theme to show the theme keynote of "the world is in the same cool and hot". For example, the emotional material collections are connected in a fast editing way, followed by a collection about trying new things. The montage effect produced by the juxtaposition of time and space naturally touches the audience's emotions. The special background of the epidemic in 2020 has been highlighted in some segments. The ubiquitous masks also remind the audience what a magical year 2020 is. However, the new coronal pneumonia which is rampant all over the world has not been highlighted indefinitely. After all, there are too many things happening in the world at the same time, and the reality is often more dramatic than movies. Some of the fragments are longer, which are taken apart and interspersed in the film. They are used as a rhythm partition and emotional buffer in different paragraphs. For example, a "train chaser" enthusiast made an oath in front of the camera that he would drive to take photos with a train at seven different points in the United States in one day. His seven group photos were placed in different paragraphs of the film, which divided the chapters of the film, and added a certain interest to the narrative.

However, in spite of its ingenuity, it is a pity that "a floating day 2020" is still limited in concept and form. The film tries to create connections between different stories, thus stimulating people's imagination of a global community. But unfortunately, it may be that short videos make people's presentation of life superficial. The film grafted from these materials lacks poetic flavor, and there is no sense of connection between paragraphs as in "one day of a floating life" in 2010. The whole film looks more like a collection of tremolo. The film, which should have helped us better remember 2020, does not seem to replicate the success of a decade ago. When one life becomes a glimpse, the only thing that can be remembered after reading is that lonely uncle who lives alone and isolated and named all spiders in the corner because of boredom.

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