It takes all of about five minutes as a doc filmmaker to learn that you need a good elevator speech. But it can be hard to distill your doc into a few sentences after you’ve dived so deeply into your subject. Besides, sometimes projects are just plain hard to pitch.
Even though climate changes is probably the biggest challenge all of humanity has to face right now, historically, it has been a really hard story to pitch. Not least because it relies on scientific explanations that are as exciting as — well — the weather, and most of the time, it doesn’t look as dramatic as many other world problems, like poverty, war, or lack of access to clean water.
With COP21 happening this past week, there’s been some really creative, engaging journalistic coverage of climate change. And while we haven’t yet come up with a way to integrate a real time carbon emissions clock into a film (if you’ve got ideas for how to do that please share!), now more than ever, those of us in business of using our docs to make a measurable impact on social and political issues are looking beyond the film itself for holistic media strategies.
Here are a couple of the things we found this week as journalists reported on the climate talks that inspired us to think about our own impact campaigns:
- NYT created an interactive story showing how Greenland is melting away right now.
- This scary video from Time shows what happens to famous world cities if the global temperature rises 4 degrees.
- NatGeo illustrated the data on how climate change will affect the world’s poorest people
- A set of FAQs about climate change, letting readers ask questions.
- WSJ developed a searchable map of pollution in European cities.
After all of this, what’s our elevator pitch for this week’s blog?
They’ll believe it when they see it —but the best way to engage with skeptics is to let them ask their questions and give thoughtful responses. Pieces like the above show us how it can be done effectively digitally.