Join Life in a Day tonight for its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Blog.

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to take part in “Life in a Day,” an historic cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. From Australia to Zambia, more than 80,000 videos, totaling 4,500 hours of footage, were submitted to the project. After months of hard work, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and a team of editors have created a 90-minute documentary film that gives a surprising, honest and entertaining self-portrait of our world.

While “Life in a Day” will be officially released later this year, tonight you have a very special opportunity to tune in to the world premiere direct from the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere will be followed by a live Q&A with Kevin Macdonald and key contributors to the film. You can submit questions for the Q&A here.

Today’s stream begins at 12pm on the Life in a Day channel. You can catch a rebroadcast on Friday, January 28, at 7pm in your local time zone, captioned and subtitled in 25 additional languages, with an additional option for audio description (AD) in English.

We hope you enjoy the film!

Tim Partridge, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “Life in a Day: A new type of filmmaking”.

What does an Australian summer really look like?

We’re a huge and diverse country - the sun shines in Broome, the rain pours in Toowoomba, the surf’s up in Bryon and the mist settles in the Dandenongs - and our summer is legend. Let’s share our collective experiences of this Aussie summer with the world. With your help, we want to create a map of the Australian summer on YouTube. Starting today, you can upload summer videos to YouTube, creating an archive of events, experiences and people from all around the country.



To take part, upload and follow the instructions to geotag your videos at youtube.com/mapmysummer. They don’t need to be fancy; we want to see any footage you’ve captured this summer on your video camera, mobile, or anything else you’ve got. Roaming through the Australian bush? Cricket at twilight? Your stories will generate an Australian map of summer.

To give you some inspiration, we’re also bringing you summer highlights from several of our top partners, including Tourism Australia, Universal Music, and Tennis Australia among others, and each week we’ll be featuring the best of our Australian summer from around the country. This week, check out a few of our favourites from Sydney Festival. Be sure to keep coming back to see how we’re mapping Australia through video.

So as you head out this Australia Day, remember: the world is watching! Let’s show them what our summer’s like, and why it’s so special. Start uploading today.

Ernesto Soriano, YouTube team, recently watched Australian summers past.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011: We’ll see you in Sydney!

A few months ago, we announced the second YouTube Symphony Orchestra to be held at the Sydney Opera House, and sent out a call to you, the YouTube community, to Play Your Part. We were blown away by the amazing videos we received in response, and the YouTube community voted on their favorites and visited the channel in their millions.

Today, we’re proud to present the 101 musicians from more than 30 countries around the world that have been selected to form the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011.

These outstanding musicians range in age from 14 to 49 and hail from five different continents, including 4 winners from Australia:

Brent MIller, Timpanist, overcame a neck injury and spinal problems to return to full-time secondary schooling in Toowoomba, Queensland, where he has performed with the University of Southern Queensland Orchestra, Toowoomba Concert Band, and the Queensland Youth Symphony

Mathisha Panagoda, Celloist, has toured Europe and China with the Australian Youth Orchestra, and has even performed at the 2000 Olympics! He has established his own chamber orchestra in Sydney, the Sydney Camerata, which is made up of young, talented musicians from around the country.

John Burgess, Bassist, was born in Queensland, Australia but grew up in the rural Mid North Coast. He began to take an interest in music at age 9, first on piano, then soon after picked up the bass guitar. He will be performing an improvisation to Mason Bates’ Mothership.

Rollin Zhao, Violinist, started playing music when he was two, and could read music before he could read words!

Also among the group is a vuvuzela-fixated trombonist from Germany, an Arizona-based clarinetist who has never left the U.S., and a Guzheng player from China whose instrument is one a lot of the world has never seen or heard before.

The orchestra and winning improvisers will be joined in Sydney by Michael Tilson Thomas, Mason Bates, and a number of professional musicians and mentors from the London Symphony Orchestra, The Berlin Philharmoniker, and the Sydney Symphony, to participate in a week-long celebration of music, creativity, technology and the arts. The week will include several ensemble concerts, classes for Australian musicians, events in and around Sydney, and the Grand Finale performance on Sunday, March 20 to be held in the Sydney Opera House concert hall and streamed live to the world on YouTube.

Everyone can participate in this celebration of creativity and technology. We’ll post videos and behind-the-scenes footage of the orchestra, from rehearsal and master classes to performance, to the YouTube Symphony channel, and to our mobile apps (which you can download on the Android Market by searching for ‘YouTube Symphony Orchestra’ or on the Apple App Store.

Be sure to tune in for more details on the week’s events.

Next stop: Sydney.

Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Australia, recently watched “Synergy: Unsung Heroes” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq_sBkNkGpY