After the impact of the rank tan palm oil campaign, Aardman and Greenpeace unveiled Turtle Journey last week a heartbreaking stop-motion animation that encourages people to take action against the maritime crisis.
The campaign brought together Greenpeaces strength as an activist with the famous creative from Aardman Animations, the creators of Wallace and Gromit and famous voices such as Olivia Colman, Dame Helen Mirren and David Harbor from Stranger Things.
The drum went behind the scenes to find out how the major project came about.
One of Greenpeaces main concerns has been to raise public awareness of the problems the worlds oceans face as a result of climate change. What started as a Twitter joke in 2018 led David Harbor from Stranger Things to dance with penguins in Antarctica to raise awareness of their plight.
Here is a petition to create the largest protected area in the world. @ Greenpeace has 1 million characters.
Lets give them 1.8.
1.8 million.
1 for each square kilometer proposed
for the guins.
here i dance with them,
as promised.
they have no netflix. @ greenpeace? pic.twitter.com/jjLBk2XOIr
David Harbor (@DavidKHarbour), February 20, 2018
The same year, Radiohead singer and environmental activist Thom Yorke released a single in support of Greenpeaces mission to protect the Antarctic Ocean from the effects of climate change, commercial fishing and human interference. The message of the ominous instrumental was broadcast on the London Marble Arch.
To celebrate World Ocean Day 2018, people from 25 countries and all seven continents have painted blue and made waves of people to demonstrate their support for the protection of the oceans.
Happy World Oceans Day! Together we are committed to a rescue plan for the oceans that would create huge new marine reserves around the world. If it
Despite all the steps Greenpeace has taken to bring this message home, Chris Till, deputy director of fundraising at Greenpeace, admitted that it was not as effective as it would have liked.
If you spoke to most people, you would have no idea that the United Nations (UN) is in the process of negotiating a major new global ocean treaty, he said on Earth.
The Greenpeace team recognized that it needed to do something to break out of its support bubble and spread its message across the world.
Ahead of the UN negotiations on the World Ocean Treaty in March, Greenpeace wanted to draw up an action plan and file a petition to ensure that the treaty was brought to life.
Greenpeace also fought peoples resistance to shocking shots. For decades, bodies like Comic Relief and Children in Need have relied on painful footage to get people to donate. However, recent reports claim that hearts are persistent against excruciating content.
In preparing this campaign, Greenpeace quickly came to the conclusion that emotional animation would be a more effective tactic.
As a society, we quickly get used to pictures that used to be shocking, Till admitted. Animation can be different because it enables people to connect emotionally. You can see yourself in history as it is difficult in the real world.
The team had also learned a lesson from its highly successful rank tan campaign. Greenpeaces emotional story with actress Emma Thompson, who has summed up the harsh reality of palm oil and the effects of its cultivation on Earth.
(embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQQXstNh45g (/ embed)
With the help of Iceland, which converted the video for its Christmas advertising, the film brought the topic of palm oil into the popular mindset. This in turn encouraged more people to take this into account when buying food and products.
It really put it in the public eye, said Till. And we knew we had to do something similar in our next campaign to really get people talking and take action against the maritime crisis.
Around the time Greenpeace was designing this campaign, Aardman Animation contacted the company to let them know that it was interested in working with the organization.
It just felt perfect, said Till. We were looking for something that would create a strong connection with our audience, and Aardman is brilliant at it. Since we are both familiar names, it would help to get the word out.
After market tests for more extensive ocean communication, the study convinced the team to focus on turtles. Till argued that while Greenpeace talks about whales, they are received differently around the world. In contrast, turtles have a universal appeal.
The Greenpeace team then talked to the Aardman producers about what they wanted to get out of the film, what reaction they wanted, and soon they started working on a job.
This was then used to reach Aardmans director network, which asked 12 questions about what this film could look like. They were brilliant and varied and offered many different ways of dealing with a potentially very difficult topic, said Till.
We knew we wanted the animation to be instantly recognizable as Aardman, he said of Greenpeaces creative vision. We wanted something that was immediately accessible and that took people on a real emotional journey.
Till explained that emotional shock was a phrase that kept popping up in their discussions, as Greenpeace knew that while it is good to provide facts and figures, it is not always enough to clarify the case or that To get people to prioritize the problem .
According to Till, the decision for the director was a fun, if painful, decision-making process, in which the team refined and restricted ideas until they chose Gavin Strange.
Just hearing Gav talk about his vision showed that he really got to the heart of the problem, said Till. He not only understood it intellectually, but also had a strong emotional connection to history. As an added extra, Strange read it to boost its pitch, along with a real musical mood.
With the first premise agreed in mid-September, Aardman started animation while Greenpeace stayed in close contact all the time, with Till admitting that the main producer was his primary speed dial.
We had to do it right because its a big story to tell in a short video, he said. Due to the process of stop motion animation, the script, sentence and characters had to be signed off before the start of the filming, since all changes become more difficult, so to speak, once they have been set in sound. When you go back and revive, you lose days and a lot of effort.
Due to the nature of the stop motion function, the team used an animated storyboard instead of a script. In this way, they were able to calculate the timing of each shot to a fraction of a second.
One problem was how the characters should be presented, since they had to agree on the exact type of turtle to focus on the color of the shell. And this had to be reconciled with the story itself to ensure that each character was scientifically correct, with clear distinctions and personalities.
The team then had to keep to a tight schedule to ensure that it was ready by January to have enough airtime to make waves before the final outcome of the United Nations maritime treaty in March was known.
To manage the team. Aardman, who worked individually on recordings, attached boards with pictures of the individual recordings on the walls so that they could move between the studios to show how it worked.
In total, the stop motion recording took six weeks a tedious process, considering that the total length of the film is just under two minutes.
(embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVDciiQT4c4 (/ embed)
Well-known voices include Olivia Colman, Dame Helen Mirren and David Harbor as well as Bella Ramsey from Game of Thrones, Jim Carter from Downton Abbey and the comedian Ahir Shah.
In addition to the scientific data and facts, Greenpeace also has an extensive telephone directory of famous stars who want to support their campaigns.
Colman really did everything, said Till of the Oscar winners performance. She took the time to take the latest The Crown recordings and deliver them in less than an hour. She just got it.
Till said he was in Harbors ear while he was recording when the actor was working remotely in New York. He said the whole process was interesting to experience as each famous voice approached the shoot in different ways.
We dont want to be accused of being hyperbolic, Till explained why, alongside the video, a report was released about the threats that tortoises face in the real world. We know that as a lobby and science organization, it is vital for us to show that science is there to underpin this story.
Turtles Under Threat reports that six out of seven sea turtles are on the Red List of the International Union for Nature Conservation and are threatened with extinction, even though the creature has crossed the worlds oceans for more than 100 million years.
Unfortunately, our film is a fiction, but what happens to our turtle family in this film unfortunately happens to real turtles around the world, said Till dejectedly.
The campaign has not yet started last week. But Greenpeace said it had already collected over 280,000 signatures not far from its 300,000 goal.
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Anatomy of an advertisement: The story behind Greenpeace's terrifying turtle extermination - gotech daily