I came across an interesting experiment being promoted on YouTube by famous Director/Producer, Ridley Scott. He’s hosting a one-day event where people across the globe will help to create a user-generated film that is already being promised a spot in next year’s Sundance Film Festival.

It’s not the first time a big director promoted user-submissions that could end up in a big budget film. The last one that comes to mind is Watchmen – where Zack Snyder worked with YouTube to have people submit commercials that could end up in the film. It’s also not the first time hundreds of user-submitted video clips were tied together to create a video–a fun one that comes to mind is the Gmail video.

Life In A Day will be filmed on July 24, 2010 by an unknown number of participants who will upload their videos to YouTube in hopes of being part of the first user-generated feature-length documentary. Kevin MacDonald, Ridley Scott, and a team of editors will review the footage, looking for a way to cut it into an interesting documentary (this will be the hardest part by far). The teaser video shown here confused a lot of people as it isn’t clear what they want the video to be of, but further digging revealed the following requests:

• What Do You Love?
• What Do You Fear?
• What Makes You Laugh?
• What is in Your Pocket?

Since I’m a filmmaker and am a big fan of crowd-sourcing, collaboration, and user-generated content, I’ll be watching the progress of this video closely – I might even participate.

Considering videos are one of the greatest ways to attack universal search (when you see videos, images, news, etc. on page one for a given search), you may want to think of creative ways you might be able to get a crowd of strangers to submit videos for your benefit. The video will surely get links from the participants and, hopefully, many more. Besides YouTube exposure, the video links acquired will send signals to Google that your video is relevant for the search query you targeted.