[Music] [Nacho Corbella] Let's do this. I am Nacho Corbella. I am the Creative Director and Executive Producer at Ripple Effect Images.
And here I am incredibly lucky to work with some of the best storytellers in the world. Our team is made up of photographers, filmmakers, animators, writers, designers, you name it.
And together, we create visual storytelling that focuses on solutions.
But why tell you what we do when I can show you? [Music] So that's us.
Thank you.
So in a nutshell, what we do is document the stories of women and girls facing the world's toughest challenges.
And we hope that by sharing their stories and experiences and focusing on solutions, we elevate their voices and hope to spark global change. Isn't it beautiful to hope for things? So that's what we do, we try to put the bar as high as possible because we know we're going to fail, but we do our best to convey that. Okay? And we have seven areas of focus. We do climate change, health, education, economic empowerment, food security, water and sanitation, and energy.
And how do we do it? So we work in many ways, but the main two are, we work on commission or self-funded projects. For the commission projects is when a client has a project idea that they want us to work on, or we find funding to work on stories we believe in, right? So what is the process that we go through? The first thing we do is define the issue.
So we define the issue, the problem that we want to cover, the phenomena, and for me essential, find a way to visualize it. This is very, very important for me. If I don't see the issue, if I don't understand the issue, I cannot make a film about it.
So this, for me, is part of finding the best way to tell a story.
And then we look for the characters and the story. So we define who will be our champion that personifies what we want to talk about and what is going on on this person's life at that moment, because ideally, we're making films so there needs to be some sort of action happening.
And then we send the team to document it.
And even though any of our team members will do a stellar job at it, we try to match them with their interests.
So...
Let's talk about a commission project. In this case, Free to Dream.
That was a commission from the Summit Foundation, and this is how I went about it.
So let's think of a standard US high school...
that has, in the country, an average between urban and suburban, it has a population of 1,500 students.
They are represented by these dots here. And the split is 51 male to 49 female. But for this case, let's say they're all girls. Okay? So what if I told you if this hypothetical high school, with a population of 1,500, made up of only girls...
Is the same as the number of underage girls getting married in Guatemala every day.
It's a big problem, right? It's huge, 1,500 girls are going through this every day.
So that's what we want to cover, right? 1,500 girls get married in Guatemala every day.
So that's what's behind our process in this particular film that tells the story of Mayra Pop, an indigenous girl from China Cadenas village, a community of 80 families of the Q'eqchi tribe located in a beautiful, beautiful tropical forest surrounded by rivers and mountains.
Let's watch it, and then we'll talk about it.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Okay.
Thank you. So just to recap, right? We decide the issue that we're going to zero in, and we do all the research that we need. In this case, we focus on Guatemala, a country where child marriage has persisted despite the fact that it is illegal to marry before 18. But indigenous traditions and lack of oversight still allow it.
And visualize it, right? I told you this for me is essential. If I don't get it, if I don't understand it, I cannot convey it in a film. And maybe I'm slow, or I don't know, but if this doesn't happen I cannot produce a good story. And I think that's an essential thing that we need to work on. We cannot just jump in and do, okay? Otherwise, we cannot transmit the urgency of the problem. We don't feel it. So we work with our partners actively to find the perfect story that we can document. We listen a lot and work together on finding the right character because they might identify a person that speaks very well but nothing is happening, or they might think that all the events that are happening are great but there's no one to voice them. So we try to marry those two things together.
In this case, the main milestone had already happened, right, the ruling, the judge situation.
And the new part of her life was not happening because there were no breaks. She was not going to the university. So how can we show something that is happening but it's not happening? So we talk, we ask what was going on? Is there anything education related that is going to be happening? Is she going back to her community? So we had the opportunity to see this girl that had evolved, that had changed completely, going back to the place where she was born and being an incredible example to her community.
And then we produce for a long time, right? We have a very short time in the field, so we want to anticipate as much as possible. We plan. We plan because we know that when we get there, things are going to go any other way.
And then we're done. Great! That's it!
For me these films are just like a marathon, and the film itself is just the first 5k.
And the reality is that anyone can do any of those films, right? They might do it better. They might do it worse. They might not convey everything, but anyone can do these films.
But the rest of the race is what takes stamina and commitment.
In our case, the rest of the race is where the film comes alive.
It is not enough just to hit publish. You need to get eyes on it, and you need to get the right eyes on it.
So I started placing, trying to place the story in media. And the thing with media is that you'll face editors that will say, "Yeah, we would love to publish positive storytelling. We want to talk about solutions because we're fed up of showing all negative or just presenting the problems, and, yes, we will welcome this." And it's extremely hard to break in. Great, but the key is to keep going. And most important is to find the right fit, because when you find the right fit, when you know what they're interested in, you know that you can push a little bit more to get that published. And that was the case. So the first one was El País. El País is the newspaper in Spanish with the highest readership in the world. It's not just Spain. It's all of Latin America. So hundreds of millions of people. Let's go there. They loved it, and that created a domino effect. Very quickly, Radio Ambulante, which is NPR's like This American Life for Latin America, very interested in pursuing the story. Univision, highest viewership in the country, very interested. They go for the story. And then we had momentum. And then slowly but surely, lots of little media, but then came CNN, Esprit America, Pictoline, Washington Post.
So it was great! This was great for us, for the story. But as it was happening, I started getting worried, right? We were talking about a girl that has not-- I don't know if she can handle all this. So we had to work very well with FUNDAECO because she was getting a lot of attention, which could have been very hard for her.
I mean, when international media approaches, I mean, I will be in the same boat, right? It will be very hard for me too. So the thing was that...
She took it on. And this, she took it as a mission.
She wanted no other girl to experience what she had gone through. So with support of FUNDAECO, we did some media training. She managed to channel all that attention to put a regional focus on the issue. And now she has become an example for the girls, not just in her community, but all over Guatemala and Central America. And she has even been invited to Congress to present her story, right? And she has become a vocal leader against forced and early unions in Guatemala. Pretty good, right? Thank you.
So going back to the where we work, right? So Free to Dream was an excellent example of a commissioned project. Mapping Survival, which we'll see, which I'll talk about next, is a very good example of a self-funded project. Because sometimes we bump into stories that we know need to be told. We're traveling all around the world, a lot around the country, and we're working on different stories, and many times we're doing something, and we see these incredible things, and we know that there's no coverage about it. And thanks to the generous supports of our donors, we're able to do it.
Well, let's go through the process again. So I find this study developed by the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, and I wanted to show the story behind this fact. So let me show how I visualized it.
[Music] How about now, is my sound on now? Yes? Awesome. So this is incredible. It's huge planet, lots of people, and just 5% of it is protecting 80% of the biodiversity. This is unbelievable. We need to do something about it, right? We need people to be more aware of this.
So I said, "Hey, team, we have a budget to self-fund the project. We want to highlight someone in conservation, someone incredibly good, but that is not getting enough attention to the work they do in the field, and we want to help them accelerate their impact." And as you know, when there's funding, there's always ideas, and we have a lot of great ones, but there was one that had the most potential.
So Eileen Mignoni told me about Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim...
And Hindou is an environmental activist of nomad origin from Chad that was doing incredible work with her community and trying to stop the conflict in Lake Chad. And it just happened to be that Ami Vitale. Sorry. Ami Vitale.
Knew her.
By the way, Eileen and Ami created Vital Impacts. It's a nonprofit that supports conservation storytellers and other conservation organizations worldwide. Their world is amazing. They also created an educational speaker series for children that you should definitely check it out. Please do. They have grants. It's phenomenal. It's lovely work. But in a way, so I chat with Ami, and she tells me about Hindou and how great character she is, the way the things that she's doing, the way she talks, and she quickly endorses her as a great story. So I have two endorsements from our team.
So now it's my turn to chat with her. She tells me about the participatory mapping project she's working on. She tells me about her community, her grandmother, and she is just a quote machine.
She starts telling me about how nomads, go about moving around and how important ancestral knowledge is. They don't get weather reports because how isolated they are, but their elders know exactly how to read the signs for weather. So that's why when she tells me our grandmothers are our weather app.
Then she highlights the importance of the place she's trying to protect, how connected to nature her community is, and the way she's working to protect the way of life. Basically, she tells me about her fight.
And then at the end, she brings it home with something that can resonate with everyone everywhere, right? Her community problem is a global problem.
So it's a no brainer. She's the one, we decide to go, we plan, plan, plan, plan. We pre-produce.
We go to the UN. We get her there in New York. We go to N'Djamena. We get her visiting with her mom, we go visit her community, and we make a film. And that film does pretty well. Lots of awards, recognition. David Attenborough wants to use some of the film in one of his programs, and we get footage requests from everywhere.
But here-- Well, not but, but the difference is that, here the strategy, it's twofold.
First we want to elevate her work to make sure that everyone in conservation or the world knows her. That's why the approach for film festivals, because that's where people are. So we submit the film to festivals, and we create the help of using all the Adobe tools, Express especially to just to push very quickly and promote images for media, right? And the ask is very simple. When I talk to people, the ask is, "We have this incredible woman, we made a film. And this is a story of how a nomad in Chad, while advocating for the rights of the community, has become a leader in the fight against climate change and a voice for indigenous people across the planet." I keep the message very short. We ask very little. And instead of pointing them to the whole film 30 minutes and asking for that, I create different teasers. And those teasers I go and I target different outlets.
So as much as I would like to show you the whole 30 minute film, I'm just going to show you some of the teasers so you can get the idea of how we went around, so.
[Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim] Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for this opportunity to speak in this assembly, this assembly who has known to decide the survival or the death of my community. [Man] One of the world's worst humanitarian crises, struggling for attention. [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] [Man] As the desert gains ground, can the vanishing lake and its people be saved? So we go for the big outlets, like BBC or French press, focus more on conflict and race and violence in the region.
This one focuses on the main problems our community is facing. We used to live in harmony with the nature...
But now, it's becoming our enemy.
Why are we getting this extreme weather even in developed countries? Because they do not respect the environment.
They have to understand, as human beings, we are only one species of the nature.
And if we are using these resources more than each other species, we are breaking the balance.
And that's exactly what is happening now.
So it's the time that they come and learn from our wisdom. The solution we can found only when we can live with this nature.
And so on, we create more.
So this one focuses more. Thank you. Thank you. And highlighting the real change-makers in the field. Just go watch the film. It's totally worth it. I just want to get to the point, in the sense that we have this strategy, right? We push for media. We have the film festival route. It went great. Conservation is getting attention.
And we got to do the other side, the media engagement. And we had this targeted, right? We're asking very small ask. We touch everyone, and there's not much interest, right? Timing could have been a factor. The fact that we released it during the pandemic might have been an issue. People might have been focused on other challenges. The length doesn't help either, and that's the only thing that I can control, right? So I talk with them and I offer creating a shorter version.
And I am told that the story is great, and the shorter version, eight minutes would work perfectly, right? So I create an eight minute version, which I'm not going to show you. Why? It's there, I can play it. Russ, just keep my mic on. I'm just going to have it as a background. Okay? So it works. It has all the content that we need but it lacks a little bit of soul, right? But I say, I mean this is what they want. It's a very big outlet that wants to run it. This would be great for Hindou. So I create the film, we talk about when to release it and everything, but the thing that bothers me the most is that they're requesting to be an exclusive for several months. And we've already gone a route that it's a little bit slow, the film festival, we're getting there, and then holding it up more months, this is not ideal. But what really bothers me the most is that by doing the cut, after looking at it, it's just, it's getting all the points. But the things that I get rid of, I think they're essential for the story. They're the things that make you fall in love with the community. They're the things that it's where you see Hindou shine. This I'm going to show you because it's a very nice sample.
At the community, when you have the first baby born, you just stay in the place until the seven days celebration before to take up the camp and go to the next place.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] For you, little baby, I will fight to keep this place safe.
And you should watch the film.
So you see, it's the soul is just, ah! "We can create an informative, documentary, but it's going to miss all this stuff." So I'm like, "Nope. People need to see this and many other scenes." People need to experience the community. They need to fall in love with the community because when you fall in love with them, you care about them. When you care, you act, right? So forget about the outlet, and I decided to set it free, and to put it in front of as many eyes as possible. We start with Plex, which it's a streaming platform, not that known here in the US, but worldwide it's one of the biggest. Then it gets picked up by Tubi, which is the largest free streaming services in the Americas.
Not much later, Amazon Prime, and now you can even find it in Apple TV. Like, yay! Great!
Done, right? The film is great. We're getting recognized. We're getting awards. People are watching it.
But what about Hindou? Right? Could this help her in any way? I mean, this is the mission, right? Again, the film, first 5k. The mission is to elevate, to help them, to show them. And when we started, Hindou was well regarded. She was known.
People knew who she was in a very small niche, but people know who she was.
But since then, she has risen to rock star status across the globe, speaking at the UN, the World Economic Forum, receiving the Rolex Award, getting her own TED Talk, and working with David Attenborough.
By all means, I don't think we did all this. I cannot take that. Like, we didn't do that. But what I do know for a fact is that we helped accelerate and amplify her voice and managed to put her story in front of decision makers that helped do that.
So not bad for a nomad girl from rural Chad, right? So-- Thank you. I'm not used to this. This is very nice of you. I really appreciate it.
So what have I learned? Right? I've been doing this for quite a while.
I started as a writer. I'm a journalist. Then I grab a photo camera, then video camera. I work in National Geographic, The New York Times, at Univision, working on big projects, focus on problems, mostly challenges. I bump into Ripple, doing positive storytelling, looking at challenges by showing solutions, life changing work, mentally life changing work. So what have I learned? Right? The focus needs to be on people. That's easy as pie, right? Data is essential. The number is essential, right? 1,500 girls, 5%, 80% of diversity. But in a story, data should not be the goal.
It's just the starting point of the conversation.
It can make us realize that something's wrong or introduce us to a problem we didn't know of...
but the focus should be on the people directly affected by the issue. And let their voices and experiences shine, right? They might not be Oscar-worthy performances, but people connect with authentic, heartfelt, unbelievable stories. Human stories connect us.
It's essential to mention the problem but it's even more important to focus on the solution. We cannot just stay on the surface. We cannot just say this happened and do nothing about it. So we highlight the challenges, but we need to show a way out.
Also, people will connect more when they see a path forward.
And we got to show them an action.
Words are meaningless if they're not backed up by actions. We want to see them doing.
And for me, personally, the most important thing is that we get a turn from victimization to admiration. Let's not say, "Ah, look at that poor girl from Guatemala," but rather say, "Look at that girl standing up for her rights and making things happen." This is, for me, is one of the most important. Emotion drives action. It's the ultimate way of connecting. Our decisions to act based on millions of years of evolution, they're there for reason and they're very powerful. It's what we call the gut feeling. So when we see something happening that we want to jump in action.
So we've got to find a way to stimulate that in your audience, to elicit emotions because emotions will drive people to act.
If we connect, if we have empathy, that will make us think about that reality that we just saw and later inspire us to do something about it.
Because right now, the issue, the data, the number, has a face and even has a name. And as humans, we want to get involved, not necessarily to help solve that issue, but we want to provide support to that person, to that organization that is doing incredible work in the field because you want them to succeed.
Four, we got to focus on the community, not the organization. Hey, we got to let the ones doing, driving the change, do the talking. Show the program in action. And please, the camera and the CEO, the program coordinator, they just stop doing that. That just doesn't resonate with people. It's a disconnect.
Amplify the voices of the doers. They are the one drives the change every day, so let's hear them. Let's see them.
And last, we need to have a clear and feasible call to action. Now that you got their attention, now tell them how they can be part of this change. Tell them what to do. You want them to donate, you want them to share, you want to sign a petition, you want to do a vote. Be very clear on what you need from them, Because that is the way you're empowering your audience to do something specific rather than overwhelming them with the problems, the sorrow, or their helplessness. This is how you create a movement. This is how you make an impact.
End to end, very short film about us.
[Ami Vitale] I don't think one image can change the world, but I definitely think that you make little cracks in the foundation. [Annie Griffiths] Great photographers can make those pictures that speak to the light in person's eyes. [Lynn Johnson] What I feel intensely now is this desire to focus on the frame, the moment, the person, the relationship, and what that person can teach the rest of us.
My name is Annie Griffiths.
My name is Lynn Johnson.
My name is Ami Vitale.
Thank you.
[Music]
