Tonight brought with it the first disappointment of this years Sheffield DocFest. While magnificently hyped, not least by its own marketing campaign (“A Historic Cinematic Experiment” booms the films poster), Life In A Day, from Kevin Macdonald the director of such classic documentary works as One Day In September and Touching The Void.

While it was always unlikely that this user-generated film was ever gonna please the auteurist moi, yet I was willing to give it a shot. While the ambition on display was admirable, and admittedly some of the sections are genuinely wonderful/moving/beautiful, I struggled to see beyond it as little more than a temporally dictated feature length episode of You’ve Been Framed, with added sadness.

Life In A Day takes place on a random day, on which nothing especial happens. For those unfamiliar with the premise, the film is constructed from user-submitted content; Macdonald set a series of questions (“What’s your favourite smell/ What do you love more than anything?” type things) for everyday people all over the world to answer within one 24 hour period, and constructed the film out of the footage sent in via YouTube (YouTube incidentally, was a major financier of the project, and at times the film seems little more than an extended ad-campaign for the website). In doing so Macdonald, quite profoundly actually, takes the idea of crowd sourcing, a current vogue in documentary filmmaking, to a new level.

While never striking the right notes, Life In A Day is an admirable undertaking, with one particular story, charting a young chinese boy waking up and saying hello to his dead mother via a shrine dedicated in her honour, almost making the whole project worth sitting through. Otherwise though, and in spite of occasional glimpses of brilliance I couldn’t help but not be taken in by Life In A Day.