I’ve never listened to Pharrell Williams’ music, but when I saw over Thanksgiving he’d turned a four-minute pop song from an animated kids film into a 24hr music video featuring performers dancing all over the city of Los Angeles, I knew I had to see what was up.

The idea sounded like a bite-sized “Russian Ark”, or Marclay’s “The Clock” without the craftiness & price tag, or a less boring, Warhol-free “Empire”. Or perhaps none of those — maybe “Happy” was meant to be something simpler; a roving, day-long danceteria, moving at three miles-an-hour across the unaware city of Los Angeles, one earnest performance at a time.

I was intrigued by how a pop song might intersect with the more rarified world of public art, & how passersby might be swept-up in the scene as it engulfed them. While watching, I discovered something I didn’t think I’d find; a new appreciation for the infinite variations of dance, for the repetitive power of a song about happiness (already a number one hit in France and the Netherlands!) and a new understanding about what makes Los Angeles one of the greatest (and spectacularly messy) cities in the world.

I’d seen clips I thought were fantastic, so I opened 24hoursofhappy.com and tried to show the video to friends, but my connection was too slow, and I was stymied by the site’s navigation. Much design & forethought had gone into constructing a system for exploring the video (through a futuristic circular-scroll-wheel thingamajig) but we couldn’t see anything and the site crashed my browser.

I wondered what the video might look like exploded into thumbnails — what it would look like to see all the dancers as pieces of a greater whole, parts of a day-long composition you could preview before committing to watching. The video’s original site wasn’t bad (it looked great, frankly) it just didn’t work well for me.

When hour-long clips from the project started appearing on YouTube, I imagined there might be a way to remix, or “re-present” the piece in a more open, shareable way. I built annotatedhappy.com, and in doing so, ended-up watching the entire 24 hours.

I added tags to each performance so you could quickly see every segment filmed on the street, or at a boxing gym, or by someone wearing pink. Celebrities were given the showbiz tag; there are two performances featuring brooms, a few with animals, and even some beards.

With all of that, here are some favorites:

And then there’s the guy who inadvertently takes a spill at 7:24pm (& 26 seconds), the dancing shoplifter, the woman who dances with a puppet, and all these dynamic duos.

Artistically, my favorite moments of the piece occur during transitions, where the performer moves from indoors to outdoors, or its opposite, where you can feel the seam of the city, where the crew and performer literally bridge between locations.

Some of these transitions occur during Pharrell’s top-of-the-hour performances. One notable example is 12 noon, inside a restaurant (a Los Angelino would immediately know the name) where he teams-up with another dancer, and the whole production works its way around and through the tables. The fireman in the coffee shop at 3:04am is another great example.

And there are as many types of performances as you can imagine. Some folks don’t really dance at all, they just shuffle along in front of the camera; some aren’t necessarily pro dancers, but you can tell they practice a lot in front of their bedroom mirrors, and there are some who start slow and rise to the occasion.

As with anything this huge, there are sections that feel like the production and performances are on auto-pilot, and after watching hundreds of people dance to the same song (I watched many performances on mute, and some backwards, for a change of pace) you’re left wondering if they couldn’t have found a more dynamic location than bike-path hour.

All told, 24 Hours of Happy is ambitious commercial art (it’s meant to sell more song downloads, right?) and while it may not be as culturally critical as Dylan’s latest, Pharrell’s piece (via wearefromla) has a strong innocence to its effort — you have to wonder why it’s never been attempted, which is at least one mark of a great idea.

While so much of today’s entertainment is carved with the sword of irony and sarcasm, it’s refreshing that Pharrell Williams has made something this substantial, this grand, that just feels good. It’s kid safe. And what you see beyond the center of the frame is a unique view of a major American city in 2013. There are homeless. There are Range Rovers. There are people who can’t wait to shove their face in the camera, and people who couldn’t care less.

I saw more in 24 Hours of Happy that led me to smile than in any piece of art, video, cinema, or television, all year. They say happiness is infectious, and after watching a few of these, your grumpy antibodies have to work overtime if they’re going to keep your frown down.

(For what it’s worth, annotatedhappy.com was built via Lightroom 5's publishing services, this remarkably powerful search and replace plugin, and koken manages the site’s front-end. Every screenshot in this piece and on the site is from 24hoursofhappy.com)