Often, after writing about movies from conception to completion for years, you begin to forecast specific preconceptions about individual films before seeing them. That's not to say judgment is clouded if you're reviewing a film theatrically, but when you hear plot lines in conjunction with writers, directors and actors, your brain begins constructing what the final product may look like. That process works with relative accuracy about eighty to ninety percent of the time; sometimes though, the subject matter is too strange or grandiose to even formulate a guess.

A good example of that would be Inception. For months I only knew it was an intense, almost sci-fi-like thriller taking place in someone's mind being directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo Dicaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. There was no predicting how that turned out, just as there's no predicting how Kevin MacDonald's new film shaped up.

Life In A Day is an astoundingly ambitious project that's been years in the making. Dozens of contributors were asked to film all over the world on July 24th, 2010. There only direction was to film life as they saw it. In all, over 4,500 hours were documented and sent in to MacDonald, who along with executive producer Ridley Scott, edited and cut the material down to feature length. Twenty-six different contributors were ultimately chosen, spanning the globe from Peru to Nepal, and now their work is about to be showcased for free on YouTube during two special live online airings.

The first will take place on Thursday January 27th at 6 PM MT, as part of the Sundance Film Festival, and a special encore will be shown on January 28th, at 7PM in viewers' local time zones. Both will take place at Youtube.com/lifeinaday.

Check out the Life in a Day trailer embedded below, to get a feel for what it's all about: