Get Together

Celebrating YouTube’s community by gathering their stories 📹Sara Pollack of YouTube's "Life in a Day"

Episode Summary

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to create Life in a Day, a cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. All in all, 80,000 submissions containing over 4,500 hours of footage from 192 nations were edited into one 90-minute film of raw, first-person scenes from real people around the globe, echoing the experience of YouTube itself. Since "Life in a Day"'s debut on the site in 2011, more than 15 million people have watched the film. In this episode we talk to YouTube's first film community manager, Sara Pollack, to learn more about a film YouTube made called "Life in a Day."

Episode Notes

*“The film was made in this amazing period in YouTube’s history where we were focused on how we could demonstrate the ways in which technology can be both innovative and net positive—how it was driving new ways of storytelling and building community.” - Sara Pollack
*

This episode we talk to YouTube's first film community manager, Sara Pollack, to learn more about a film YouTube made called "Life in a Day."

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to create Life in a Day, a cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth.

All in all, 80,000 submissions containing over 4,500 hours of footage from 192 nations were edited into one 90-minute film of raw, first-person scenes from real people around the globe, echoing the experience of YouTube itself. To bring cohesion to the submissions, users were given a range of prompts from “What do you love?” and “What do you fear?” to “What’s in your pocket?” to respond to with their footage.

Since the "Life in a Day"'s debut on the site in 2011, more than 15 million people have watched the film. (You can still watch it there today.)

How did YouTube come up with the idea for the film? How did they get the word out to YouTubers and to the world? Why did they create a film in the first place? We called Sara to find out.

🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙

Get Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members? Subscribe to our podcast for more great stories like this one.