Living Life in a Day and a summer in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival

This is a cross-post from the Official YouTube blog

Update 7th July: We've changed the video in the post as "We Were Here" goes into festival consideration.

This weekend at the Sydney Film Festival, we in the Australia office saw a single day on earth, a legendary summer to be remembered and the vision of thousands of YouTubers from all over the world on center stage. Along with the Australian premiere of “Life in a Day,” the world was introduced to “We Were Here,” a feature film made by YouTubers about summer in Australia.

From January - April 2011, YouTubers down under submitted their videos to create an archive of events and experiences from a summer not-to-be-forgotten. Everything from sunsets at the beach, bats in the night, to extraordinary events in Queensland were uploaded to form a new visualisation of the Australian summer map. These stories were pulled together by up and coming Australian director Amy Gebhardt, mentored by Dr. George Miller of “Happy Feet”, “Mad Max” and “Babe.”



To celebrate the world premiere of “We Were Here,” we’ll be featuring the film on YouTube for a short time before making its way around the film festival circuit. Have a look at this collective vision of the Australian summer, as told by director Amy Gebhardt:

Together, these two films are milestones in the evolution of radically inclusive film-making that is taking shape all over the world.

Ernesto Soriano III, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube Australia recently watched “1000 words for summer.”

Mapping the Aussie Summer: We Were Here brings YouTube to the Sydney Film Festival

What does an Australian summer really look like? We asked you to submit your answers and from Brissie to Broome and everywhere in between, YouTubers responded with hundreds of videos, creating a map of Australia through an archive of events, experiences and people. Over the past two months, director Amy Gebhardt worked with Dr. George Miller to create a film made from your YouTube videos to put together a unique vision of the Australian summer, as told by you.

This Saturday, the film We Were Here premieres at the Sydney Film Festival at 8:35pm EST, and will be available on YouTube at the same time! You can have a sneak preview of the trailer right here:



Can’t get enough YouTube on the big screen? We Were Here also premieres alongside Life in a Day, the first full-length user-generated documentary, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Life in a Day was crafted into a feature film by Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald, and chronicles a single day on earth. The world premiere was live streamed right here on YouTube, but it’s also coming to theatres soon.

Have a look at the Life in a Day trailer which has only recently gone live:



Together, these two works represent a new generation of truly radically inclusive filmmaking, pulled together through the help of YouTubers from all over Australia, and all over the world! Come back to youtube.com/mapmysummer to watch We Were Here, which will be available online for a limited time. And be sure to subscribe to youtube.com/lifeinaday for updates on the Australian theatrical release.

Posted by Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Team, just watched Summertime Rolls