Global Renewables Educational Films

Category: Website Design,

Helping companies to build their brand and sell their products can be challenging enough, but that's nothing compared with the challenge given to us by Lancashire recycling experts, Global Renewables.

They asked us to help them to teach children how to save the planet!

It was an innovative project that required an imaginative solution.

The brief

To produce three short films to educate Lancashire schoolchildren about how they can reduce their waste by using the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

In order to really capture the children's imaginations, a simple educational film would not be enough. We had to make the ideas real and directly applicable to them in terms that the children could understand, using situations and characters that they could really relate to.

That's when our creative team struck gold, sand and space.

The concepts

By putting the three concepts into the context of a familiar children's story, it made it much easier to communicate the messages we needed to in a way that the children could easily grasp. It's hard to see the point in reducing waste, until you compare the Earth to a giant spaceship. In the same way that an astronaut has to be careful to reduce the waste in the limited space on his ship, we have to be careful not to fill up our own 'spaceship earth' with rubbish.

Similarly, reusing things for another purpose seems pointless, until you compare the earth to a desert island. A man stranded on a desert island has to make the most of the little materials he’s got, and we have to do much the same on our 'desert island earth'.

The final film, featuring the genie from Aladdin, shows how everything, even rubbish, has a value, just like it does in Aladdin's cave.

The production

Once the scripts had been carefully honed to suit the target age group, we began the production process, using the wide range of film production and post-production facilities available in-house at Ainsworth & Parkinson.

Our film unit produced all the live action sequences, while our illustrators drew up the many backgrounds and scenes required by our computer animation team. These two elements were then married together seamlessly in our state of the art post-production suite to create the cut.

The Result

By having a full range of filming and post-production facilities in house, we were able to carefully control the costs and produce three high quality films on a relatively small budget.

Both our client, Global Renewables, and the end user, Lancashire County Council, are delighted with the finished films and they share our confidence that they will make a real contribution to the teaching of environmental issues in local schools.