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YouTube is getting out of the business of originals: The Google-owned video giant said it is winding down its original productions team after more than six years.

Earlier, news broke that Susanne Daniels, YouTube’s global head of original content, will leave the company in March. Going forward, YouTube will only be funding programs that are part of its Black Voices and YouTube Kids funds, chief business officer Robert Kyncl announced Tuesday.

Citing the growth of YouTube’s Partner Program for ad-revenue sharing — which now tops 2 million participants — Kyncl said “now our investments can make a greater impact on even more creators when applied towards other initiatives.”

“We will honor our commitment for already contracted shows in progress and creators who are involved with those shows should expect to hear from us directly in the coming days,” Kyncl wrote in the message posted to Twitter.

When it first started out in originals,...

"I want them to grow up in a world that's kind." YouTube Originals has debuted a second trailer for their documentary sequel Life in a Day 2020, a follow-up to the original Life in a Day film from 2010. This just premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, and debuts streaming this weekend. YouTube and the filmmakers asked people all over the world to record their lives to tell the story of a single day on Earth. The filmmakers received more than 300,000 submissions, nearly 4x the number of submissions to the previous film, which includes thousands of hours of footage from 192 different countries, in more than 65 languages. This second trailer (watch the first here) includes the song "Strangers," a new recording of The Kinks classic by Black Pumas and Lucius. This looks like the kind of film to experience with family or friends, to remind you of all the beautiful life on...

Black Pumas have teamed up with Lucius for a cover of the Kinks’ “Strangers.”

The song appears in the trailer for the upcoming documentary Life in a Day 2020, which will debut on CBS prior to the Super Bowl on February 7th. Lucius’ Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig provide backing vocals to the Lola Versus Powerman track, while Eric Burton takes the lead. The musicians also released a video that goes behind the scenes of the recording.

“To me, ‘Strangers’ has a really interesting way of cutting through straight to the soul,...

It’s been precisely a decade since the first edition of “Life in a Day” debuted at Sundance, though in internet years, that amounts to several eons. YouTube was young, Facebook was the hip subject of a hot movie, and TikTok was not yet a glimmer in a millennial developer’s eye. The film’s concept was simple but seemed quite radical: A fully crowdsourced documentary, assembled by director Kevin Macdonald and editor Joe Walker from a vast haul of amateur footage shot on a single day by over 80,000 international applicants, it sought to elevate the scrappy YouTube video into art. Since then, however, the ultra-short-form online video has become its own art form, free of assistance from prestige filmmakers. YouTube is now the old-school daddy of such faster, flashier platforms as Vine (Rip), TikTok and Triller, exploited with increasing wit and invention by content creators who were still watching...

than the crowdsourced YouTube doc “Life in a Day 2020.” The internet video behemoth foretold a new era of DIY filmmaking when it launched in 2005, and just five years later it tried give an artistic patina to the amateur works that defined the site with “Life in a Day,” an assortment of uploaded clips given some coherence by veteran documentarian Kevin Macdonald. The result was meant to be profound, a glimpse at the beauty of the ordinary. But it was just ordinary.

A decade later, YouTube and Macdonald have doubled down with “Life in a Day 2020,” which leans into the gravitas — and what better year to get “deep” than 2020? Over 320,000 amateur videographers from 192 countries uploaded videos shot on July 25, 2020, and the footage could be anything. Some are performance works: a Black guy sings the Schubert Lied “The Elf King” in crisp, precise German; one teenage Italian girl poses coquettishly...

Starting today, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival gives us a first glimpse at the year in cinema, and this year it’s available to a wider audience than ever before in virtual form. With many tickets still available, we’re now providing our yearly trailer round-up for those interested in a preview of the lineup.

Ahead of our coverage, bookmark this page for a continually-updated round-up of trailers and clips, kicking off with Taming the Garden, A Glitch in the Matrix, Land, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, Life in a Day 2020, and more.

Check out the trailers (and clips) below thus far in alphabetical order and we’ll be published reviews soon, so follow along here.

Coming Home in the Dark (James Ashcroft)

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet (Ana Katz)

Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

A Glitch in the Matrix (Rodney Ascher)

In the Same Breath (Nanfu Wang...

"Let's shake it up!" YouTube Originals has unveiled an official trailer for their exciting new collaborative documentary project / sequel titled Life in a Day 2020, a follow-up to the original Life in a Day film from 2010. This is premiering at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, then debuts streaming a week later. YouTube and the filmmakers asked people all over the world to record their lives to tell the story of a single day on Earth. The filmmakers received more than 300,000 submissions, nearly 4x the number of submissions to the previous film, which includes thousands of hours of footage from 192 different countries, in more than 65 languages. Among the massive number of submissions received for consideration, notable individuals featured in the footage include Covid-19 vaccine researchers in Oxford, Rohingya & Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter protesters, a US Army veteran reflecting on his service, a woman and her challenging fertility journey, and many more personal portraits.

In about a month, director Kevin Macdonald will sit down to review around 500 hours of the best video footage submitted by YouTube users from around the world and then make a movie from the contributions — all captured on one day: Saturday, July 25, 2020.

The film project, “Life in a Day 2020,” comes 10 years after the original YouTube-commissioned documentary, which Macdonald also directed. But amid the global coronavirus pandemic, Macdonald tells Variety that he doesn’t want to focus specifically on people’s experiences during the crisis.

“I’m hoping it’s not all people in face masks,” he says. “We’re definitely not trying to tell the story of Covid. We’re just trying to show people’s lives. It’s about what is important in your life today – what’s the emotional story you are telling today.”

For the new movie — produced in a process Macdonald calls “communal filmmaking” — YouTube is accepting submissions at lifeinaday.