Project:
Design of a digital impact report for documentary film Happening: A Clean Energy Revolution that highlights its mission and communicates the outcomes of its long-term campaign to educate the public
Client:
Founded in 2005 by Robert Redford and his son James Redford, the Redford Center supports and funds environmental impact media-makers.
Project Expertise:
Creative Direction
Visual Design
Storytelling
A hopeful revolution
Happening: A Clean Energy Revolution is a documentary film by filmmaker and director James Redford, chronicling his personal journey to understand and document the movement for clean energy across the U.S. The film takes him from Texas to New York, discovering how clean energy works, and what it means for local communities as well as at a personal level. Given our current climate crisis, it’s a surprisingly hopeful story of human resilience, social justice, and innovation.
Showing AND telling “impact”
Following the release of the film, the Happening team embarked on a long-term campaign to use the film to help educate and activate the public in creating demand for clean energy. Close to two years of this activity needed to be translated into an impact report. We decided on a landscape format digital pdf built in InDesign which could have dual use for presentation as well as sharing.
The story’s the thing
The target audience for the impact deck were many and varied: donor/investors, producers, industry professionals, media creators, and the climate community. I partnered with Sr. Communications Manager and the Executive Director of the Redford Center to develop content and shape the narrative for the deck. In the case of Happening, the central story of clean energy is actually that it is multiple stories resulting in multiple spheres of influence in the movement for renewable energy. It was also important to keep James as the central character, as in the film, around which multiple stories could be told on both local and global levels.
Designing for a movement
My source for branding was solely from the film poster itself. I was able to extrapolate the look and feel of the deck using color blocking, bleeding imagery and type contrast to keep the information digestible and lively. Production stills and tour photography provided image sources. The client emphasized that the key to telling the Happening story was being very hopeful in tone – this is especially effective and differentiating from current climate crisis narratives, which can frequently border on gloom-and-doom.
The takeaways
The challenge of designing impact and pitch decks is something that I’ve found that I relish. It’s the perfect storm of storytelling, persuasion, and client collaboration. As a designer, I’m challenged to separate signal from noise, and do it in the most efficient way possible. Whether you’re talking about yearly impact or you’re trying to sell an idea – it all comes down to a compelling story.
