Reston: The YouTube Film Festival

Hope you have some spare time this weekend, because you'll want to pop some popcorn and settle in in front of your YouTube machine as you binge-watch all six videos submitted for the Reston 'My Community' video contest. Even though our awesome submission was somehow overlooked -- and our favorite Reston-themed music video was also snubbed -- the rest of the video offerings are almost as good. (Actually, they're all pretty cool, though we'd lose valuable Snark Points if we just came out and said that.)


The first entry is a historical piece on the Reston Farmer's Market and one of our community's most cherished activities -- duking it out over zoning ordinances. Though the market won a battle with county officials in the 1980s, development prompted it to shut its doors in 1997.



Here's a cute kid describing one of Lake Anne's brutalist adornments as a "moon viewing platform," which we learn was a Mayan practice, minus (we hope) the human sacrifices.



An off-brand cover of the Footloose theme adorns this video about the creation of a Reston mural we've analyzed in some depth. Bob Simon makes a Hitchcockesque cameo appearance in this one.



In this video, Sophie tells us why she likes living in Reston. "We feed the ducks," she tells us. But does she want to live here when she grows up? Sorry, no spoilers.



This one's a visual tour de force. If music could approximate soothing DRB-approved earth tones, its soundtrack would do just that.



This one conclusively proves that Reston is a dog's life. Oscars all around, especially for the costume staff who provided our canine navigator with more wardrobe changes than a Lady GaGa concert.

The winner gets a respectable $1,000. You're supposed to be able to vote for your favorite video, but for the life of us we can't figure out how to; we'll update this if someone clues us in on how to work this "web browser" thing the kids keep talking about, the end.