One Day In Boston: Video Series Highlights Life in the City
One Day in Boston Map shows where each video was made
For an entire day in late April, filmmakers from around Massachusetts descended on Boston and the surrounding suburbs to tell stories about the organizations, residents, institutes, and businesses that make up the collective area, for a series called One Day in Boston.
The project, titled Your Day. Your City. Your Future., was an extension of the annual One Day on Earth initiative, where videographers from around the world spread out and collect footage of daily life for a collaborative documentary. This year’s goal was to create films that investigate 10 questions about the future of a given city in the U.S., and highlight the work being done to shape that region. Other cities that participated were New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Filming took place for an entire day as moviemakers captured footage simultaneously but in different spots around Boston. The individual projects were then edited before they were submitted to the One Day in Boston website, where they can be viewed in their entirety.
Videos about the pockets of the city’s neighborhoods and culture include a look at Project Right, a Dorchester-based non-profit organization that works to keep kids from getting involved in gang activity, the story of the Fort Point neighborhood, and a day in the life of Mayor Marty Walsh.
“We hope to provide Bostonians with a platform to show the world their Boston, through their lens: what we love about our city, what are our challenges, the solutions we need, the people and places that make it so unique, and to envision how the city will evolve in the next 20 years,” said Cecily Tyler, cofounder and producer of One Day in Boston. “It’s a pivotal opportunity to capture a moment in time for our city. We have changes going on in many areas of our city right now—this [is a] chance to share our voice is so timely.”
The videos first started to trickle in during May, which was the intended deadline for the collective 24-hour series. But newer videos filmed in Boston have continued to get posted to the site this month. Four new videos went up in mid-June.
An interactive map accompanies the overall project, allowing users to click on a pinpoint in a given region of the Greater Boston area and watch a video about that specific neighborhood in the sidebar. There are more than 30 videos—complete with descriptions about the subject matter and its location—available for view.
On the website’s blog, there is also a series of question-and-answer-style interviews with the people behind the lens, where viewers can find out about the filmmakers’ motivations for their one-day filming project.
Below is a sample of three videos from the One Day in Boston initiative:
