How Three Drunk Monkeys helped YouTube put Australian summer on the map – Screen Australia to create a short film from the submitted footage

UPDATED: The brilliant YouTube Map My Summer website – which was on CB blog back in mid March – was today selected as FWA Site of the Day.

Three Drunk Monkeys, Sydney has collaborated with YouTube to create YouTube Map My Summer, an experiment that asks “What does an Australian Summer really look like?”

Audiences are encouraged to upload videos of their many and varied summer experiences, and these clips then populate a blank map, forming an abstract representation of Australia. Site visitors are able to browse the map and video content through an info-graphic styled interface, which segments the video-data into colour-coded categories.

This YouTube experiment has inspired Screen Australia, which will create a short film from the submitted summer footage. The short will be mentored by legendary filmmaker George Miller (left) and then premiered at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival in June.

Says Ben Cooper, Three Drunk Monkeys digital director: “YouTube wanted a content idea that celebrated Aussie summer and rallied Australians to submit videos of their summer experiences. We needed a mechanism to show the shape of summer and the diversity of this particular Australian summer. Starting with a blank map, we’re remapping Australia via summer experiences. The shape unfolds as people upload and share their summer to all.”

The Map My Summer experiment has been featured throughout summer festivals and most recently at Tropfest by way of a video-submission-booth and the YouTube Creative Festival, where visitors could explore the site via touch screen.

YouTube Map My Summer 2010/2011 concludes at the end of March when we’ll know exactly what this Australian summer looked like.

Agency: Three Drunk Monkeys

Clients: Lucinda Barlow – Head of Marketing; Ernesto Soriano – Product Marketing Manager