2019 was a big year for us. We covered a huge amount of ground – creating films for everyone from Disney to Extinction Rebellion.
It was also the year we declared a Climate Emergency and rebooted our business model to use our skills as engagement experts and filmmakers, to help collaborate with other experts to push stories we feel it is imperative we tell at this point in history.
Hopefully with a little humour and wit 😉
Recognising the power of finances to change the world, we started working with Triodos Bank to represent their revolutionary banking offering (they are the best and only truly ethical bank in the UK) in a suitably revolutionary way through film. Our initial experiments have lead to a doubling of response rate and we intend to build on these results in 2020 by bringing more energy and playfulness to this great brand.
Working with Richard Roaf at Video Rev, we created an entire suite of videos for the UK arm of the Global Youth Climate Striker movement, rallying people to attend the September 20th Global Strike across the country. Reaching over 3 million people, and working with a diverse mixture of young strikers from Greta Thunberg to local activists across the country, we did everything from entering Boris Johnson for his Geography GCSE (as he is struggling to understand the issues!) to going back to school ourselves to create a series of playful videos with young people reaching hundreds of thousands of people each.
Working in partnership with Extinction Rebellion, we created a series of films aimed at taking climate messaging out to new audiences. From working with ex police officers protesting as part of XR to create a film featured in the Telegraph, to making two films with octogenarian protestor Phil Kingston which reached over 600,000, to interviewing editor in chief of The Lancet medical journal Richard Horton encouraging all doctors to take part in non-violent civil disobedience to protect their patients (reaching 440,000 people), we took climate messaging to well over 1.4 million people, and collaborated with some exceptional humans doing exceptional things to protect our planet.
We created a video tone of voice, and series of videos for the excellent ItsOurTime voter registration campaign run by The Comms Lab, aimed at getting over 2 million young people to register to vote with the climate in mind. Over 2.5 million young people eventually registered 🙌 and our videos were shown online, on moving billboards, and shared by influencers to hundreds of thousands.
Our Adult Craft Skills and How Did You Learn to be Creative series each launched to tickle the fancy of audiences online. Experiments in what we can do with very little resource, these two projects reached tens of thousands of people online, and helped us hone and test a few new distribution techniques benefiting our commercial and campaigning work, as well as allowing us to amass a wardrobe of sweet 70’s threads.
We’re determined to keep building on the success of 2019 to create more positive change in 2020 – a year in which the world definitely needs some love. Key goals include:
In 2019 we reached over 6 million people with climate and social change films. This year we’d like to double that reach.
If 2019 was the year we tested our theory of how to apply 15 years of viral filmmaking nouse to the climate crisis and proved it worked, 2020 is the year we intend to step this up to work with more major national and international organisations to make real impact. If you need help reaching millions with social change messaging, and need expertise like ours (and want an injection of humour and emotion) hit us up!
We’re deepening our relationships with psychology experts, linguists, framing experts, systems change experts and academics to increase the rigour with which we create, distribute and measure our work. Whilst the spirit of our work is fun, what’s under the hood needs to be the best conceptual thinking out there for us to make the impact we need to. Thankfully, we’re working with some great people in all of these fields.
We ain’t gonna change our world for the better using the business techniques that broke it. We need to innovate models that allow empowered collaboration, build resilience, and most importantly facilitate playful creativity. This is our focus, and will be collaborating with academics at Exeter and Bristol universities to solidify, expand and grow our thinking. Try, fail, improve. We’re learning fast 😉
When the world is full of crap, nothing brings us more joy than to get up every morning and use our skills to help make things better. We are embracing the risk and enjoying the journey.
If any of the above fires you up, drop us a line. We’re open for chats, collaborations and action, whether you’re a brand trying to embrace the future with courage, an NGO who needs to supercharge charge your ideas and films, or a change expert looking to collaborate. Hit us up folks 😉
Posted By
MattG