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

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TRANSCRIPT

Bailey Richardson: I read that you worked in the traditional film industry before you ended up at Youtube in 2007. How did that switch happen?

Sara Pollack: I had been working in New York at a few different companies, mostly as an executive assistant for a place called Green Street, a small production company.

After five years I was a little bit disillusioned with that industry. It was impenetrable to be in in some ways. So I was having a little bit of a crisis about what I wanted to do. I was thinking about all kinds of jobs honestly. I went to get a career counselor. I almost went to law school.

One day I heard that Google was buying YouTube. To be totally honest, I remember telling Mia [Sara’s boss, and the first community manager at YouTube] this in my first interview, I wasn’t a huge YouTube user in 2006 and 2007. I really didn’t know that much about it, but I could imagine that it was sort of going to be the future of entertainment and that it was probably going to grow really quickly. I thought I could probably use my background in film and entertainment, but potentially in a more innovative cutting edge industry that was going to move a lot faster than the traditional film business.

So I sent my resume in online and then found a family friend who worked at Google who forwarded my resume specifically to HR or something like that.

In the film businesses, I made absolutely no money. I lived in New York City and I remember getting flown to San Francisco by YouTube and that was mind boggling to me. Nobody had talked to me about a hotel and I was too shy to ask if they would put me up for a night, so I remember landing and being like, “Okay, I don’t know where I’m going to go after this interview.” I called some family friends to see if I could stay with them. And then at some point HR told me I had a hotel room. I was like, wow.

I had like a five-hour interview. Mia was one of the people that I met. I really loved them. Youtube was about 80 people at that point in time, so it was a very different vibe—probably similar to your early days at Instagram. And it worked out.

Hiroaki Aikaw aand his son Taji sit down to talk about contributing to Life in a Day. Hiroaki’s wife, Taji’s mother, passed away 8 months before they filmed the day in their life. The two were flown to Sundance to participate the premiere and as official co-directors of the film.

One Year Later: Hiroaki and Taiji Aikawa share how their lives have changed since submitting the story of their lives to “Life in a Day.”

BR: You mention Mia Quagliarello, who is a friend of mine (read our interview with Mia here) and was the first community manager at YouTube. Mia told me in the email she sent connecting you and me that you were the best hire that she ever made.

Why do you think Mia chose you for the job?

SP: I can’t believe that’s true, but Mia is the nicest, kindest person ever. I love her.

Um, I think timing had a lot to do with it. My first job at YouTube was as the film community manager. I was specifically tasked with building a filmmaker community on the platform, trying to get filmmakers to think of YouTube as a place for them and their content, not just amateur home video.

I think the fact that I had some experience working in the film business, working with talent agents, and being at film festivals helped. Then I have to imagine that I was probably one of the first people to like proactively pushed to get in there from the film business at that time. So that was just the luck of me kind of being a bit disillusioned and looking for something at the right moment.

The community team Mia built at the outset was incredibly special. There’s a few people left now dispersed through Google, not at YouTube—I think I’m the only one that YouTube now—but it was a group that reflected Mia’s values. We wanted to highlight great storytelling and had authenticity and belief in what YouTube could be and do at the highest level that was really optimistic and positive. So yeah, I think that probably was a shared attribute among all of us.

One clip from “Life in a Day”: Shot by Toniu Xou and Patricia Martinez del Hoyoa of Spain, a young girl climbs a human castle in the small town of San Jaume dels Domenys in the Spanish province of Tarragona.

BR: That sounds very familiar to my experience with Josh Riedel, who was the first community manager at Instagram. I really feel like he set a humble, generous, egalitarian tone about what we were trying to do. It was really a beautiful way of approaching the work, and I think all of us really mimicked his approach. That trickles outward to everyone you communicate and connect with and the work you choose to do obviously.

How did you come up with the Life in a Day project?

SP: I get zero credit for the idea. It was all a guy named Tim Partridge who was based in our London office at the time he pitched this idea.

There was a program at Google and YouTube, both actually called the Dragon’s Den where marketers could pitch creative, out of the box ideas annually. A group of senior marketing leaders would hear the pitches, ask questions, and then a handful of projects would be chosen at various levels to be resourced and brought to life.

So Tim pitched Life in a Day. I remember actually having a meeting with Tim because of my role and my background where he kind of explained it to me. The first time I heard it I was like, I don’t know man. A documentary made from hundreds, if not thousands, of points of view. How is there going to be continuity? How will it feel to go from one clip that could potentially be super high quality, to something really low quality? How are we going to weave this narrative? So I had a lot of questions and a dose of skepticism about whether it would work.

I shared that feedback with him and kind of said, here’s some things that I would think about as you try to flush this idea out. Maybe a few months later my boss at the time came back to me and said, “We want you to oversee this project. What do you think?” And I was like, well, it’s ironic because I gave Tim some feedback but of course I would be happy to. I really want to figure this thing out and figure out how it works.

So Tim ended up joining my team. There had been an evolution from the editorial and community management team to marketing. So we had a SWAT team across marketing and PR.

I think the reason people were excited about it was two fold. We were able to work with Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott. That sent a message about the caliber of work happening on our platform and the partnerships that we were striking.

Director Kevin Macdonald talks about how extraordinary it is to meet all of the film’s contributors for the first time.

But I think also, and this is true of YouTube Symphony Orchestra too, this was a really amazing period in YouTube’s history where we were so focused on how to demonstrate the ways in which technology could be both innovative and net positive, and drive new ways of storytelling and building community. The film was certainly a great example of that brought to life.

BR: Can you tell me about what the original idea was? Was the final product very close to the original idea or did you change it?

SP: To be honest, that was the original pitch: 24 hours on earth. A 24 hour glimpse of life uploaded by people around the world in different languages, countries. It was called World in a Day at first.

With Kevin Macdonald the director we refined the ask to users because it was a challenge to weave a story that’s comprehensible across so many different people’s experiences and content. Kevin added specific questions that we asked people, like “What do you love? What do you fear?” There was one kind of tangential question: “What’s in your pocket right now?” Some things that came in really didn’t directly answer those questions, which is fine and great, but some did. I think that helps give some structure to what you ultimately saw.

Part of Kevin’s intention was just to make people comfortable and to ask something that was relatively straightforward to answer that can ease people into it.

BR: How come you guys decided to work with Kevin Macdonald? What was it about him that made him the right fit for this kind of work?

SP: He was actually attached to the project already at the time that I came on. We partnered up with Ridley Scott’s production company, Scott Free, first. I believe they brought Kevin on. He was an accomplished documentary filmmaker who was genuinely interested in this idea, which is kind of rare at that point in time. There was still a fair bit of skepticism within Hollywood about YouTube. To have somebody who was accomplished and so talented but also really interested in the concept and what it could be, was amazing.

BR: You said you were concerned about the film having continuity in terms of quality. How did you accomplish that with videos from so many different devices and so many different places?

SP: The creative of the film was really, really driven by Kevin and Scott Free. That happened in London. They had an edit room that had tons of editors—young film students in London who they recruited. They went through the process of documenting and auditing all of the content that came through. It was tremendous. So there was this period of crazy categorization, which ranged from video quality and resolution to the richness of the characters. That filtered out the content and identified stories that would come back throughout the film.

So it was really Kevin and the team at Scott Free that pieced together the story and made it what it is. I remember we went to London to see a rough cut and by the time we saw it, it was already amazing to me. Goosebumps. I was blown away. It really had worked.

BR: Take me into that moment. What about the film made you feel goosebump-y?

SP: It was just the light miraculousness of wow, this actually is a compelling story that was told by so many different people. There was something that was so beautiful about the human condition and about people. God, if you really think about it in the context of today, I would love to just immerse myself in the feelings that I had watching that. Kind of spiritually feeling really great—reflecting on humanity and people and what ties us all together and makes us similar regardless of where we live and what we have.

BR: At Instagram we thought a lot about the idea of “if not for Instagram you can’t tell these kinds of stories.” Those were the stories and users we would spotlight—ones that wouldn’t have been visible if not for Instagram.

Why, from your point of view, was the film such a good fit for exactly what YouTube was and what the community loved about it?

SP: It was the best example of what YouTube could do and be in terms of people just genuinely and authentically wanting to participate in this “experiment.”

That’s what we called it, an “experiment. We actually referred to it in messaging externally as an experiment and invited people to participate. I guess that shows from the get go that we weren’t totally sure if it would work creatively.

But yes, I think it’s one of the most beautiful expressions of YouTube. Obviously YouTube is still very community-driven, but it’s also very creator-driven. Right. We all aggregate around specific creators and there’s a dialogue. There’s a back and forth, there’s sharing, but now we’re the fans and we support the creators. I think this was sort of a slightly different time, or at least a different experience of YouTube, where it was very egalitarian and it was like everybody contributed and took part in an equal way. That was special.

YouTube made a series called “Meet the Filmmakers” to bring the people behind the submissions to life. Above is the Liginski family. They decided to make Life in a Day their family project as they share what families that confront cancer have to deal with.

They then made “One Year Later” films to follow up with the people behind the submissions. Here’s the follow up with the Liginski family.

BR: How many people contributed?

SP: There was something like 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations.

BR: Damn. How did you get the word out to that many people to submit? Did you do it through YouTube itself, through partnerships?

SP: I look back at that period of working at YouTube and it’s fascinating to me. We had no ad agencies, we had no creative agencies. We didn’t spend money on paid media. We were totally scrappy. We had a little bit of time from a UX designer internally to help us make a channel for the film. Maybe Scott Free handled the key art, but I think we may have actually done that with their feedback to create all of the display units that we ran in the product. It was all incredibly scrappy resource-wise. But yes, we definitely promoted it through the product—through display units within YouTube, through blog posts. We did a lot of blog posts at that point in time.

We also reached out to film schools and created a bunch of collateral for them to share with students. We worked with some non-profit organizations actually and distributed Flip Cams back in the day.

BR: Oh yeah, I remember those.

SP: We wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just a Western story—a story of what life is like on earth based on where YouTube had predominant viewership at that point in time. So we worked closely with nonprofits in countries where people weren’t using YouTube quite as much at that time to make sure that those stories were a part of the film.

Our press team worked really hard to get people to write about it.

We had masthead on YouTube at the time actually that was an ad unit. We did use that.

That was it. We did not know if, you know, if we’d get like a hundred submissions. So we were really blown away by the amount of submissions

BR: What do you think motivated people to submit?

SP: It’s a great question. I mean, people have busy lives and it’s interesting that so many people were intrigued by this.

I think it was the early days of social media and streaming and people were just excited to be a part of something that was new and different and a part of the time. If we did it today, would we get the same response? If people have gotten used to social media as a part of their lives, maybe it doesn’t quite have that same special “what am I pushing forward here?” feeling.

Kevin Huynh: I’m just thinking of that earlier concern about the footage varying in quality. You know watching it now I almost feel like it’s one of the strengths of the film, seeing the different levels of quality actually makes it even more human. More sort of accurate. It’s almost endearing to know that, sure, some shots are a DSLR using 1080P and others are a Flip Cam. But these experiences have common threads as well and that is beautiful.

SP: 100% yeah. I think had it all come in beautifully shot and high resolution, like it would not have nearly the impact that it has. I totally agree that the variation in what came back quality wise just underscored the authenticity of the project and ended up being a real strength. I think it just allows you to really focus on like the humanity of it. It becomes much more about the human being to showing up and saying what they say and what their world looks like. I don’t remember being obsessed with the quality or noticing it all that much to be honest with you because the quality variation wasn’t really the point.

After the “Life in a Day” World Premiere at Sundance, 24 YouTubers were flown out and brought up onstage to participate in the Q&A.

BR: The beauty of the film release approach that you guys had was, it was so egalitarian. It incorporated the community. For example, I believe everyone who submitted footage was named a co-director. You brought a certain number of people who contributed to Sundance with you. And I think users could apply for a film screening to come to their cities. You could apply.

Can you tell me about the way you approached releasing it that way?

SP: There was absolutely no way that we were a traditional theatrical release without a window on YouTube.

At the time we were dealing with the status quo—the modes of how entertainment content gets distributed and what windows look like. It’s only very recently and post Life in a Day that releases have started to change dramatically with so many streaming platforms. So a traditional release was never on the table.

A handful of the filmmakers behind “Life in a Day” were flown out to attend the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Photo credit by AP Photo.

That said, I think all of us wanted the film to be seen on a big screen by anybody who wanted to see it that way. So from the get-go, we were wondering how we could find a happy medium that allows us to showcase the films on a beautiful big screen, but also pushes how it gets distributed and invites the world to participate in seeing the film just as much as we invited them to participate in making it.

The first thing we did was we livestreamed the premiere from Sundance, which had never been done before. We had an ongoing relationship with Sundance. We really wanted the film to premiere there because it felt like a great celebration and recognition of the work. But we didn’t only want it to premier at Sundance because that felt elite and for only those who could attend.

So we really all had to band together across YouTube and Sundance to figure out how to get everybody on board with a livestream because it had never been done before. I think it kind of challenged even the Sundance brand at the time and you know, we managed to pull it off. But that was without question the most stressful day of my entire career. We had so many technical difficulties. I’m pretty sure we had Chad Hurley and Steve Chan in the audience, which is always stressful when your founders are sitting there with you.

Because we were doing it all for the very first time, we hit some sort of API quota, so as people were trying to watch the stream they were getting blocked. At some point we realized that if we just put a credit card into app engine and increased our payment by, you know, $10 or so we would be able to serve the film many more hundreds or thousands of people.

Anyway, I’m figuring that out kind of on the go. There were so many technical issues and I remember just like being backstage in that theater. I’m truly thinking that I was going to melt into nothing on the floor. But it ended up working for the most part. There were a few moments of buffering, but we were experimenting with something new and it generally worked.

Then we partnered with National Geographic on the theatrical release. You could request a screening and we would send out little marketing kits that people could use—flyers, posters—to get their community’s excited about seeing the film. That and it was obviously also available on YouTube for free.

BR: Why did YouTube invest in such an ambitious film?

SP: This was a product of its time. I don’t know that we would do it now. I don’t know that we would be able to do it now.

It was a really unique time at YouTube, both in terms of how people externally perceived and were using the platform but also internally how small and scrappy we were. That enabled us to get a lot done. It is kind of mind boggling how much freedom there was.

Honestly, I was probably the oldest person working on that project and I was 29 at the time. There really was no senior oversight. We had a great executive sponsor in London and she was just amazing. She helped us when we needed to unblock. But we were really trusted to just go do it, and that is how we got this done, to be honest. It wasn’t like consensus-driven stakeholder management. It was just like go do the thing and make it great. I think that was a big piece of how it got done.”

“When I heard that I was chosen, I screamed and I danced!” Caryn, one of the contributors selected to attend the Life in a Day premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, talks about waking up early on July 24, 2010, to take footage of the Staten Island Ferry.

BR: You’ve been at Google & YouTube for 10 years or so. I’m wondering, why do you stay at YouTube? What keeps you there?

SP: So I left for four years and went over to Google. I came back to YouTube in December.

What I do now has undercurrents of what I did before, but it’s a very different company and world. That’s really interesting for me to process and reflect on some times.

Now I oversee marketing for YouTube originals, which is our original programming effort, and some of our entertainment verticals—fashion and beauty, public figures.

What’s really compelling for me is being part of a business that is growing so many businesses at once. We’re definitely not the same scrappy company that we were in 2009 but we’re growing businesses in a very different way. That is its own really fascinating experience. There’s YouTube music and our subscription music service, there’s YouTube TV, there’s YouTube originals, and then there’s the YouTube app and within that many, many verticals.

YouTube has evolved a lot. I have nostalgia for the early days for sure, but I also am in awe of where the site has gotten to in terms of how many creators are making their living on the platform. The scale is mind boggling. So it’s a different experience now, but it’s still very interesting.

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