Media releases - 2011
DR GEORGE MILLER TO MENTOR FILMMAKER AMY GEBHARDT ON YOUTUBE MAP MY SUMMER PROJECT

Thursday 3 March 2011

Iconic filmmaker Dr George Miller has selected Amy Gebhardt to make a short film about the Australian summer experience for the YouTube and Screen Australia initiative, Map My Summer. Dr Miller will mentor Gebhardt in making the film, which will include raw footage from the Map My Summer online promotion. The short film is scheduled to premiere at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2011.

YouTube Map My Summer is an online project in which Australians can upload footage of how they spent their summer. Selected footage will then form the basis of the final film by Gebhardt, creating a tribute to what summer means across the nation.

Says Amy Gebhardt, “The invitation to build a film from the general public’s uploaded content is a creative challenge unlike anything I’ve ever encountered, and that excites me. The resulting film will be an intriguing collective expression of our relationship to summer and identity. I am hoping some really personal stories will emerge as well as some unique visual styles that will colour the end result with something memorable. I think this initiative is quite an extraordinary way to develop content and to share with the world how we see ourselves. The opportunity to work with George Miller on this is a great honour, I have great respect for him as a filmmaker, so it will be interesting to see how our processes converge on such an unconventional filmic project.”

The YouTube Map My Summer portal is currently playing host to a diverse array of uploaded footage, from swimming with sharks on the west coast, to herding fish in country VIC, hailstorms in Canberra in the first week of the year, and Australia Day celebrations in Mt Dandenong.

Five people, whose footage is included in the final cut, will then be invited to attend the premiere of the film at the prestigious Sydney Film Festival in June, with flights and accommodation provided.

Amy Gebhardt was selected by Dr Miller based on her short, Into the Sun, a slow motion, dreamy reflection on the human body immersed in water. The film was a stand out for Miller, best known for his work on the Mad Max trilogy, Babe and the Academy Award®–winning Happy Feet.

Says Dr Miller of his choice of Amy Gebhardt, “Whenever several artists tackle a similar theme it’s always interesting to see how varied their approaches are. Here we have three talented filmmakers looking at ‘summer’ and their responses are surprisingly different.

“I went with Amy’s film because I responded to it viscerally. Although its narrative was minimal, it was, moment to moment, compelling to watch. And once seen it stuck in the mind.”

Initially three award-winning filmmakers were invited by Screen Australia and YouTube to create their own vision of summer. Ariel Kleiman, Luke Doolan, and Amy Gebhardt all submitted their own personal takes on summer, to act as inspiration to participants of the YouTube Map My Summer project. All three short films can be viewed on Screen Australia’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/screenaustralia

Submissions to YouTube Map My Summer are being accepted online until 31 March at: youtube.com/mapmysummer. Videos must have been shot after 1 December 2010, be no longer than 3 mins, and be an expression of summer.

Footage of Amy Gebhardt talking about Into the Sun as well as the Map My Summer project can be viewed at: www.youtube.com/screenaustralia - Into the Sun

A video of George Miller discussing his take on the Australian summer and storytelling can be viewed at: www.youtube.com/screenaustralia - Dr George Miller

Biography – Amy Gebhardt
Amy’s talents have been acknowledged in many ways during the past few years. She won international prizes for her shorts Walnut and Look Sharp in 2007 and 2008, as well as the Flickerfest Short Film Festival award for Best Direction for Look Sharp. She was awarded Kodak Australia’s new director of 2008 and won a Silver Lion (for advertising) at Cannes in 2009 for her Anzac Memories beer commercial. She was nominated for the Rising Talent award at the Inside Film Awards in 2008. Amy’s half-hour documentaries A Night at the Drive-in and Heart were shown on SBS and ABC TV respectively and she directs commercials under the Melbourne-based Exit Films banner. She attained an arts/law degree and worked as a cinematographer before training at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and moving into directing.

Screen Australia media enquiries
Susan Hoerlein, The Lantern Group T: 02 9383 4029; M: 0422 553 343
susan@lanterngroup.com.au
Teri Calder T: 02 8113 5833; M: 0408 440 995, teri.calder@screenaustralia.gov.au