Crowd-sourced documentary ‘One Day in Los Angeles’ shoots Saturday

Most film productions tend to spend a lot of time shooting a relatively narrow range of subject matter. “One Day on Earth” takes a slightly different approach.

“Think globally, film locally” could be the motto for “Earth,” a crowd-sourced film project originally founded to document a single 24-hour period with video snapshots from around the world.

After holding three such events since 2010, the project’s creators are now zooming in further with “Your Day. Your City. Your Future,” a similar 24-hour collaboration that will take place across 11 American urban centers, including Los Angeles, and explore the issues and cultures poised to define cities over the next 20 years.

On Saturday local filmmakers — both amateur and professional — are invited to participate in “One Day in Los Angeles” by shooting micro-documentary videos about why they live here, what challenges the city faces and what’s in store for our collective future. You can watch the Los Angeles trailer for the project above. For more information, and to participate, visit the project’s website.

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Founder and director Kyle Ruddick emphasized the democratic nature of the project in a phone interview. “We try to keep the barrier of entry really low,” he said. “Just grab a camera and film something that day — that’s the primary requirement.”

Ruddick added, “This is something that anyone can do. There’s top-level professionals doing it, and there’s certainly, like, inspired soccer moms interviewing their children. So it’s a real wide gamut, and that level of diversity creates unique authenticity.”

The project is also providing cellphone cameras for use in some communities.

The videos, and similar ones from Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Detroit, the Lower Rio Grande Valley, New Orleans, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, San Diego and San Francisco, will be collected and published online in a geotagged archive, and the material will also be sculpted into three hourlong episodes to air on public television later this year. (One Day on Earth is also a nonprofit organization.)

Los Angeles should prove fertile ground for the endeavor. Cofounder and executive producer Brandon Litman said over the phone, “L.A. is such a massively huge city with so many different identities. We as an organization are so interested in trying to uncover and peel back some of those layers to see how this diverse city actually works together.”

“If there’s one thing that this project does really well, both on a global and a local level, it’s that it really does show how the individual stories are actually part of a bigger story,” Litman said.

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