When the President of the USA spoke directly about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) carbon reduction target of 30% for USA power stations we knew this was the start of an important consultation process.
The Carbon Visuals design team brought this idea to life in some sketches with our iconic carbon bubbles. In a matter of hours we had the beginnings of a short video which we could turn into a clear and engaging piece.
A Vine animation went public shortly after the data became public on Twitter, several other social media platforms, and simultaneously through our Image of the month mailer to thousands of people.
Whilst the short Vine video was doing the rounds we were able to complete the rendering process on a slightly longer, but still very clear, video for You Tube.
There is quite a bit of rhetoric in an announcement like this plus literally hundreds of pages of report, charts and figures. But what is the story that people need to hear to ‘get’ what is being discussed? We needed something that would make sense to a very broad audience and help them make sense of this proposal, quickly.
Each time we looked at all the documentation we returned to the EPA total figure 730 million metric tons of carbon pollution saved under this proposal. In order to make this a more manageable figure we divided this by the number of US households.
We now had our story and the data to visualise: how every US household can save 6.335 metric tons of carbon every year through the EPA plan.
The project has shown that we can create short and engaging animations in a matter of days, something that could be particularly useful for any organisation that has a positive story to tell and wants to get it noticed by a wider audience.
By chance, our Chief Operating Officer, Ravi Kapur, had just returned from a White House event and our reference point for this story became clear. A check on the height of this, the most famous house in the world, provided the perfect context to communicate the scale of this emissions savings for every other household in the USA.
President Obama speech here
Our EPA Carbon Reduction Plan videos here
We created these films because we thought they might help the conversation and because of course it may help get exposure for our business!
Antony Turner, CEO Carbon Visuals
