It's been five years of hard work, tears, and love, but filmmaker Sandra Pires has finally got her start-up running - Yesterday Stories - an app showcasing the stories and history of the Illawarra and other NSW towns.

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People can watch the videos of historic tales or upload their own, which she said would encourage everyone to become a filmmaker too.

"We had the idea 10 years ago and that was before the technology was available, it's taken that long to get to this point," Ms Pires said.

"What this platform is doing is democratising the storytelling.

"People can upload their own stories to the platform - whether that be their personal history, their family history, the street , buildings, paranormal, .. Indigenous military history, colonial, migrants - everybody can upload their story and tell it their own way."

Tales from Wollongong are the first to be launched with other areas to go online soon including Bega, Goulburn, Berrima, Young, Canberra, Deniliquin, Haymarket, Paramatta, Lithgow and more.

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Despite it being one of Ms Pires' biggest achievements, she was never really a history buff.

"I never actually liked history, it wasn't until I was approached in 2007 to look at the coal mining history and ... I had people say 'my father always talked about his story' but they didn't know about their family history, until we showed them the film," she said.

"I've always have been interested in telling stories that have been about the underdog and stories that should have received more prominence in our national narrative."

One of her history documentaries, Pig Iron Bob, aired on the History Channel and was created by the filmmaker and her team at Why Documentaries, about the Dalfram Dispute at Port Kembla.

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It told the story of how wharfies stopped loading Australian pig iron on the Dalfram ship, which was headed for Japan in November 1938.

"I saw what producing those documentaries did for our local community," Ms Pires said.

The new app may have taken a hard slog to get to launch date, but the real journey "has only just begun".

A film festival will be opened in January with $5000 in prize money available, to encourage people to upload their own videos of stories they feel should be told and populate the site.

www.yesterdaystories.net.au