From horror show to biophilia: video strategies to keep your planetary militancy going

Two great examples of how you can use animation and film to play the full keyboard of the human emotional condition, when it comes to viscerally engaging people with the urgency of climate change.

Above is one of the RSA’s Minimate videos, where the text of a significant speaker is illustrated on the fly - “whiteboard animation” - done by Cognitive. This is an extract from a longer interview with the journalist David Wallace-Wells from 2019, whose book The Uninhabitable Earth was one of the most powerful warning-calls to climate emergency in the last 24 months. It manages to make his stern warnings seem witty, but also - in the end - amenable to our right action.

Yet once you’ve shown your audience how big their personal and systemic challenge is over climate change, you should try to give them a concrete sense of what it is they’re fighting for - which is a peaceful co-existence, and learning with, other non-human beings on this planet. What could trigger that biophilia we need, to defend what we love?

Try this astounding video above. It’s a robotic deep sea exploration off the coast of Western Australia, in an area known as the Ningaloo Canyons, down to depths of 4500 metres (report here). Up to 30 new species were discovered on the trip - and the images above make you thrill and wonder that you occupy the planet with such spectral, monstrous, and sheerly beautiful natural creatures and forms.

Something to defend. But in terms of the bleaching of Australia’s coral reef, an urgent defence.