For this brand video, we had three specific goals. One: raise awareness of Ecojustice. Two: tell the origin story and successes of Ecojustice. Three: empower people in the face of the many current global environmental crises.
We started from a question that we get often here at Ecojustice: What can I do? When the issues we're dealing with are so large and multi-layered, it can feel overwhelming. Despair leads to inaction. We wanted to give people hope, and proven victories that will inspire them to find strength in the Ecojustice community.
Our answer to the question 'What can I do?' is to flip it on its head. Moving away from individual responsibility (and blame) and into systems change and holding those in power to account. Our final line, 'Together, you won't believe what we can do.' hammers home that in order to make a real difference, we need to move away from 'I' and into 'we'. After all, there's an 'I' in Ecojustice -- but more importantly, there's an 'us'.
To create this brand video we turned to the power of animation. With such a rich history and so many milestones to communicate this allowed us to go beyond the limitations of live-action video or stock imagery to tell a compelling story. The layered, cut-out illustration style was chosen to make the most of our recently refreshed brand colours and cement our visual identity in a unique way. And working as we do in the field of environmental law, it was crucial to us that when showing a species, we're using the correct species in a Canadian location. Our supporters are highly educated about Canadian landscapes and species, and so this way, we could ensure that we were able to communicate effectively, without being limited to sourcing real footage of the last wild-born Spotted Owl in Canada (for instance).
Working with Point Blank, we went through an iteration process to hone in on the story we wanted to tell. Starting with style frames we worked together to ensure each and every illustration not only brought the vision to life but expressed Ecojustice’s values and represented our audience correctly.
For instance there were challenges when we felt the visuals were not inclusive enough (the variety of genders, body shapes etc.) and we fed this back to the creative team. When a scene showing Indigenous resistance felt not quite right, we brought in Indigenous Ecojustice staff who gave their concerns about what was depicted.
The colour palette of the illustrations was another carefully considered choice. Looking at the typical visual shorthand of using black to mean 'bad' and white to mean 'good', we wanted to flip this on its head and use black to symbolise good -- for instance, the colour of the lawyers' robes fighting for the environment. And though the human shapes were heavily stylised, we want to ensure a good range of 'skin' tones.
The style of the animation was not meant to be realistic but instead use the rough, organic shapes of nature to create scenes in a modern interpretation of the Ecojustice brand narrative. This artistic approach allowed our animator to take these illustrations and use animation to create a visual flow of our story as we grew and evolved over the years. We wanted each scene to blend into the other, creating the feeling of reading a storybook and evoking emotion through movement and visual cues.
We had a very open, collaborative approach for this project, working through decisions together to get to a final project that was both visually appealing and true to Ecojustice’s values and mission.
We have had strong results with our animated brand video “What can I do” and with only a few months since public launch are already meeting our objectives.
Since we launched the video in April of 2024, we have been able to utilize our video for television PSA’s, through email and digital marketing including social media, and with events both virtual and in person helping to grow our awareness. Already “What can I do” is one of our most watched videos on our YouTube channel in our 30-year history.
We received and are receiving positive responses from the public and our supporters, including this response from Dacia, an Ecojustice supporter. For us this really shows we have empowered people to act.
“I just watched the new animation video. Fabulous! I am really excited to have this tool to share with friends to encourage them to get involved in Ecojustice campaigns. In my opinion you guys have done a wonderful job in striking just the right tone. I’ll call it serious optimism. A call to action.”
