Mason Shor

I chose one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals written by the 193 members of the UN and released in 2015. Working with goal #15, Life on Land, I set out to create a short video to educate on the issue and campaign for attainable and sustainable change the public can strive for.

My primary challenge was in creating a clear and cohesive concept and similarly conveying that concept in a compelling video. Beginning with the issue of Life on Land I initially narrowed to the goal stated in 15.5 "Take urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity and, by 2020, protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species." Through the lens of the wild bee population I aimed to address factory farming, climate change, loss of habitat and biodiversity largely due to pesticides, herbicides, and monoculture farming systems without overwhelming the audience with that language.

My audience was non-urban homeowners in any fertile region, primarily families. In order to create a widespread change, I was interested in a large audience that still had agency on the matter (land-owners). The aim of my video is to communicate how serious the problem of the bees dying is and how approachable the solution can be, to confirm my simple solution of loving the bees back and how that will actually make a difference. My primary concern was making the problem approachable with the aim of creating change by many small actions, not burdening the public but actually enriching their lives.

When it came to communicating with the audience I decided to create a living storybook. As my research on how to truly save the bees and in turn create wider change for the environment allowed me to narrow my audience I simultaneously narrowed the possibilities for a successful visual style. My concept necessitated an emotional connection to the bees and that coincided well with appealing to an audience of families. I used both a physical book and early-childhood teacher's narration with superimposed hand-drawn animation to tell a simple story. I told the story of the bees surrounding an image of their habitat to strengthen my message and empower the audience by directly showing the effect of their actions. As I illustrate the current situation/problems and how my audience's actions can directly affect the bees, the bee's activity ebbs and flow with the health of their environment.

I had a lot of fun working with the movement of bees and growth/change in their environment in a hand-drawn storybook style animation as well as the application of those animations on top of the live-action storybook reading in the creation of the final product.