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Film as Environmental Activism with Jeff Orlowski

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Documentary director Jeff Orlowski has made significant impact awareness around climate change with his films CHASING ICE and CHASING CORAL. Hear how he uses emotional entry points to get audiences to connect to environmental topics.

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How has the director inspired future filmmaking?

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How has the director inspired future filmmaking?

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I think Jeff Orlowski inspires me because he uses film as activism and that is a great way to get others to pay attention and it raises awareness on issues. For example,  the emotional reaction he wants from the audience is awe as he shows how climate change can affect the coral and ice. He manipulates the speed of the footage to take the audience along on the journey.

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filming the making of the documentary, behind the scenes footage of the film in the documentary

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International School History - Documentary Film Making in the History Classroom

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CGI (computer generated imagery) and Graphics

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CGI (computer generated imagery) and Graphics

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Can be used for mapping and adding subjects to the film

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The background music can direct the audience how to feel, enhances the story and adds to the atmosphere. A low sound can foreshadow something startling. I can use different types of music to invoke different feelings in the audience.

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To act or perform something again. This can help bring historical accuracy and enhance the story and makes it entertaining. Especially in crime documentaries where they re-enact a murder. If the documentary relies only on the interview then it's quite boring because there's nothing to look at.

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Direct or Indirect Interview
Direct- asking questions where the subject is knows the purpose of the survey
Indirect- asking questions where the subject does not know the purpose of the survey

Filming people who are speaking about events with questions asked by filmmaker. It's important for character introduction. The subject should be framed using negative space and leave room behind the subject (4-15 feet between them and the wall). The background can influence the way the subject is perceived by the audience. I can interview people to hear their story or their perspective and then use that with other clips.

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Off screen narration, commentary from filmmaker. It can either be spoken while the camera is filming or added to soundtrack during production. I can use this in a documentary where the person I am interviewing can voiceover other clips (like a re-enactment with a voiceover).

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- Director, producer and cinematographer for Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral
- His latest film is on Netflix, The Social Dilemma

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filmmaker, photographer, entrepreneur, problem-solver.

Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski served as director, producer, and cinematographer of the Sundance Award-Winning films, Chasing Iceand Chasing Coral. He is a two-time Emmy-Award winning filmmaker, and founder of the award-winning production company Exposure Labs. His latest film, The Social Dilemma is premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Orlowski's films have screened at the White House, the United Nations and the United States Congress. He has captured over 80 awards from film festivals around the world. Both Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral were shortlisted for the Academy Award for Chasing Ice went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

His company Exposure Labs is dedicated to the creation of both film productions and impact campaigns. Their team has done extensive environmental outreach campaigns throughout the United States and the world.

Orlowski has worked with Netflix, National Geographic, Apple, Stanford University, the Jane Goodall Institute and many others. His work has been featured on the National Geographic Channel, CNN, NBC and covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, NPR and Popular Mechanics and many more. He has traveled on tour representing the Sundance Institute, President Obama's Committee for the Arts and Humanities, and the National Endowment of the Arts. He was the inaugural recipient of the Sundance Institute | Discovery Impact Fellowship for environmental filmmaking, and named a 2017 United Nations Champion of the Earth. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski served as director, producer, and cinematographer of the Sundance Award-Winning films, Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral . He is a two-time Emmy-Award winning filmmaker, and founder of the award-winning production company Exposure Labs. His latest film, The Social Dilemma is premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

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- He wanted to be a photographer at first
- Then he shifted to cinematography
- He got invited to go to Iceland and he realised how much nature was changing
- He captured nature to see the harsh reality of climate change
- He uses film to show what is going on in the world and hope that people care

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They may not have the cute faces of animals we typically feel a connection to, but these animals are calling out for our help. The recent film takes viewers on an underwater journey to demonstrate coral bleaching due to climate change. The reality of the devastation happening to ocean ecosystems is grim, but the film delivers beauty along with an overall message about the one thing most important of all - hope. We were grateful to speak with director and producer, Jeff Orlowski - who is a friend of Dr. Jane Goodall - about the film and his passion for sharing stories to inspire action.
Tell me a little bit about yourself: How did you become involved in filmmaking?
Growing up we would get National Geographic - I fell in love with pictures of the world, and knew I wanted to be a photographer. Part of my interest actually also stems from Dr. Goodall. I met Jane when I was a senior in high school in NYC. It was an emotional time, as we met directly before the events of 9/11. I was the editor-in-chief of my school's newspaper and Jane wrote for us about how we should still have hope after 9/11. We connected and built a strong friendship; She has been a great mentor. I've heard her speak hundreds of times, and she is my communication inspiration.

Later on, I shifted to cinematography. My senior year in college, I got an invitation to go to Iceland, which was a dream. In my exploration, I realized how much of nature is changing. Capturing nature set me down a path to discover the harsh realities of climate change. I was aware of it, but didn't realize the magnitude. Now, I use film as tool to show what's happening in the world and hope to get people to care.
You've worked on two recent and notable pieces with "Chasing" in the name: Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral. What are you (we) chasing and why is it so important?
We are on the frontlines of climate change trying to capture stories which can help an audience feel what climate change can really look like.
Dr. Goodall has said, "Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right. " How do you feel your films are a "dialogue" and how do you want to reach people with your message?
The planet is changing drastically and it's most evident where people don't normally go. We capture the visual story of change in remote places, and bring it home. There are a lot of dismissive people. It's easy to remain in the bubbles of our lives and not connect the dots between local and larger scale change. Connection is not going to come from charts or preaching, but from stories through the eyes of people who care. If you see coral dying through Zack Rago's (coral lover/camera tech featured in the film) eyes, you'll want to do something.

It's important to look at our actions and ask, "Are we ok killing coral reefs?" We may collectively say, 'Yeah.' But that's not what I feel or what most people think when they realize what's happening. Dr. Goodall doesn't say 'you must do this'. To articulate a point, she might tell a story about an amazing pig that saves someone's life. Sharing emotional stories gets people to think about our relationship to the planet. We want people to fall in love with coral reefs like Jane has people fall in love with pigs, chimpanzees, or other causes.
What was it like to know you were filming the demise of a massive coral ecosystem? What have you learned from that experience in terms of facing a hopeless situation and turning it into hope for others?
That's the entire goal. This film was made with naysayers and skeptics in mind; I pictured conservative friends while making it. We didn't want to just make this for the "environmental choir." It's important to know your audience and how to engage with them.

We're also working on an impact campaign to use the film as a tool for more conversations. We want to reach unexpected communities, messengers and champions. How do we get the local business person, politician, or football quarterback say, 'I care, and I want to do something.'? The film is politically neutral because the issue transcends politics. We need to build bridges to protect nature for nature's sake, and because it is our home. We have a huge opportunity to turn things around and we can all work together.

Everything makes a difference, and we are already making a difference. There's so much that can and needs to be done. We must do it. There's no alternative.
Would you be able to share a story that keeps you going and taking action in the fight against apathy and environmental destruction?
Forests, coral reefs, the arctic - all these ecosystems are being stressed beyond their capacity. It's daunting and deeply saddening. When I think about that, I also think about Jane. Jane didn't go to Gombe to be a communicator and activist; She went there because she loves animals. I went to Iceland because I wanted to travel and take pictures. The job of environmental photography shifted from being an idyllic dream job to this burden of being on the frontlines of our planet falling apart. Jane went to a pristine place and watched it change. Now she works every day for it to be saved. Jane's lectures start with first person narrative and by the end she has people wanting to do everything to protect the planet. Nobody wants to be told what to do. You have to encourage people to care and understand through stories.

Getting people to say 'I didn't realize...' is what we aim for. The knowledge and footage we've gained is rare and I'm in the privileged position to amplify these stories. It is depressing, but It's an opportunity for awareness. We need more Janes in the world and more people sharing stories that resonate and everyone can understand.
The Jane Goodall Institute is a global community conservation organization that advances the vision and work of Dr. Jane Goodall. By protecting chimpanzees and inspiring people to conserve the natural world we all share, we improve the lives of people, animals and the environment. Everything is connected-everyone can make a difference.
I travel 300 days a year and it's exhausting, but at the back of mind is an 83 year old (Dr. Jane Goodall) woman kicking my butt doing the same, so I can't complain. I also think about how the worst situations can inspire us to do incredible things. It's close to inevitable that we are going to lose a majority coral in our lifetime. What does a worst case scenario look like in 20, 50, 100 years? That's a dire and horrible vision. Every action we take as individuals adds up to be one step further away from that worst case scenario. Everything makes a difference, and we are already making a difference. There's so much that can and needs to be done. We must do it. There's no alternative.

Jeff Orlowski is an example of someone who through pursuing his passions, transformed his talent and caring into a magnificent ability to tell stories with a purpose. It is through every grasped opportunity that we can both find greatness and have the greatest impact. The credits in the film Chasing Coral are dedicated to young people who can make that difference, and it is up to all of us. Around the world, corals are bleaching, even off the coast of Dr. Goodall's beloved Tanzania. It is up to every individual to make a change. Nature can rebuild, if we give it a chance.

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Exclusive 'Chasing Coral' Interview with Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski

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They may not have the cute faces of animals we typically feel a connection to, but these animals are calling out for our help. The recent film takes viewers on an underwater journey to demonstrate coral bleaching due to climate change.

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-  Jeff Orlowski said it was never his plan to make only environmental films

- in the Social Dilemma, he talks to people who used to work for big social media companies

- the film is about how social media damages society and how the companies exploit their users data to get money, the detrimental effects on mental health and the spreading of false information
- the films website teaches you how to make you tech usage safer

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A character in "The Social Dilemma" is pulled back to the platform. Photo courtesy of The Social Dilemma.

Boulder documentarian Jeff Orlowski's latest film altered his relationship with technology. Now that it's debuted on Netflix, it's poised to change yours, too.
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Jeff Orlowski doesn't miss social media. At all.

"I was honestly very addicted to social media a few years ago," the Boulder filmmaker says. "I checked it countless times a day. I'd be trying to write a scene, and then I'd get a Facebook notification and it would completely distract me."

According to Orlowski's latest documentary, The Social Dilemma, those Facebook notifications were working exactly as intended. The film illustrates the detrimental effects social media has on society and argues that these platforms aren't simply being misused by fallible humans, but instead steering those humans toward their worst selves-insecure, uninformed, distracted, depressed, and, in some cases, radicalized.

Those ideas aren't new, but under Orlowski's direction, the documentary delivers them through some very powerful mouthpieces: The very people who helped build Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk appear in the movie to renounce their own work. Many say they've left the platforms entirely. Orlowski followed their lead, and after watching The Social Dilemma, which debuted on Netflix this week, you might, too ( watch it here).

"I see parallels between the fossil fuel industry and the tech industry," Orlowski says. "When we first discovered oil, it was this really great resource that had loads of opportunity. And only years later did we realize that it was really bad for the climate. I think the same applies to social media. Despite the individual benefits that might come from these platforms, there are consequences, both for the individual and for society, that we have to reckon with now."

Viewers lauded Orlowski's previous documentaries made under the umbrella of his Boulder production company, Exposure Labs. He followed nature photographer James Balog's journey to catalog the rapid melting of icy landscapes in 2012's Chasing Ice, the recipient of a News and Documentary Emmy award for Outstanding Nature Programming in 2014. Orlowski's second film, Chasing Coral, tracked coral bleaching events in the ocean's reefs, won an Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and introduced the world to beloved Boulder coral nerd Zack Rago when it debuted in 2017.

It's easy to see the link between sweeping aerial shots of ice-encrusted environs and underwater photos of once-vibrant coral leeched of its color by warming ocean temperatures. In comparison, The Social Dilemma, with its line-up of tech industry insiders, may feel like a bit of a departure from Orlowski's earlier work. But Orlowski says it was never his plan to make only environmental films-shining a spotlight on forces irrevocably changing the world has always been the goal.
[Read More: 5 Movies by Colorado Filmmakers to Watch Now]
So when he saw tech insider Tristan Harris posting on social media about social media's many manipulations, he was intrigued. The concerns Harris, a former Google Design Ethicist who studied how the search engine reshaped people's minds and attention spans, seemed to mesh with another idea: filter bubbles. The topic of a Ted Talk by Eli Pariser, filter bubbles are the result of internet platforms' race to feed users the information that will keep them coming back. The problem, of course, is that being shown only what we like inhibits us from learning new perspectives.

With these concepts in mind, Orlowski began asking lots of questions of lots of people. He talked to a former YouTube software designer, a former vice president of engineering at Twitter, the former president of Pinterest, and a former engineering lead at Facebook who invented the "like" button. Many have the word "former" before their titles because what they saw in Silicon Valley's most iconic companies disturbed them-platforms designed to deliver dopamine hits to users' brains, such as notifications that they've been tagged in a photo or received more "likes" on a post. Once users get on the platform, various details make it hard to leave. When a video nears its end, an algorithm will unearth another one it thinks you'll like; those blinking ellipses when someone is composing a reply message are no accident.

Those interviews become the backbone for The Social Dilemma, which posits that the data mining enabled by the platforms, as well as the resulting mental health problems and social division, represent an existential crisis as foreboding as climate change. "My team and I were joking that we went to one group of scientists depressed about the world to another group of technologists depressed about the world," Orlowski says.

Collapsing ice floes or coral-reefs-turned-ghost-towns come with strong visuals attached. What goes on behind a screen-or in a YouTube-watcher's brain-is harder to depict. To remedy that abstraction, Orlowski's team created a narrative component for the documentary. The family depicted struggles to come to grips with how social media is altering their lives. "I wanted viewers to be able to emotionally identify with the story," Orlowski says, "and not have it just be a bunch of intellectual conversation around algorithms."

A slightly zanier side of that narrative imagines Vincent Kartheiser of Mad Men fame as a series of puppet masters behind the screen, planning how to recapture a character's attention with, say, a notification about an ex starting a new relationship.

For Orlowski, understanding how social media plays on people's desire for connection and affirmation has made using those platforms feel gross. Though he does still have to use them-to promote the movie. "Our hope there is to share educational resources and materials that we have picked up along the way," he says. The film's site, thesocialdilemma.com, provides a link to a data detox kit to make your tech usage safer and saner, as well as advice about setting media usage rules with your family. The website even reveals platform machinations. Click on certain buttons, and a pop-up explains how they function to keep you tuned in.

"This project has completely changed my relationship with technology," Orlowski says. "I am so much more conscious of when something is a tool that is helping me accomplish what I want to do in life, versus when it has its own goals to try to get me to do something for it." He says he's feeling happier, motivated, and more creative-so fans can hopefully expect another revealing project soon.

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"The Social Dilemma" by Jeff Orlowski Asks You to Delete Facebook

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Boulder documentarian Jeff Orlowski's latest film altered his relationship with technology. Now that it's debuted on Netflix, it's poised to change yours, too. * Jeff Orlowski doesn't miss social media. At all. "I was honestly very addicted to social media a few years ago," the Boulder filmmaker says.

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Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski served as director, producer, and cinematographer of the Sundance Award-Winning films, Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral.  He is a two-time Emmy-Award winning filmmaker, and founder of the award-winning production company Exposure Labs. His latest film, The Social Dilemma is premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

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Stock, historical, or archival footage? Of what?
There is footage of the experts the filmmakers are interviewing, character re-enacting and b-roll footage to make it entertaining to watch.

Re-enactment? Of what?
There is a re-enactment of a family with a guy named James becoming addicted to social media
The artificial intelligence is personified/dramatised with three actors to show how your phone can track your data and recommend things to you based on your activity.

Narrator / voice-over? Who is telling the story?
The experts tell the story,
Tristan voice-overed clips of the characters re-enacting using social media. Johnathan voiced over re-enactment clips and graphs showing statistics.

Scripted dialogue? Who wrote the lines, i.e., who was really speaking?
The family's dialogue is scripted because they want to show what it is like for a normal family to show how they are getting addicted to the technology.

Conversational dialogue? Who was speaking?
There were characters playing a family where the kids are addicted to their phone, there was also the AI.

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With subject(s) of film? Who are these subjects?
These subjects are professionals in the social media and data industry like Google, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

With experts? Who (or what profession)?
Tristan Harris-  former design ethicist for Google
Jeff Seibert- former executive of Twitter
Bailey Richardson- Instagram early team
Joe Toscano- Former experience design consultant for Google
Sandy Parakilas- Former operations manager for Facebook
Guillaume Chaslot- Former engineer for Youtube
Lynn Fox- Former director of corporate PR for Apple
Aza Raskin- Former employee for Firefox and Mozilla Labs
Alex Roetter- Former Senior VP of Engineering for Twitter
Tim Kendall- Former Executive for Facebook and Former President of Pinterest
Justin Rosenstein- Former Engineer for Facebook and Google, Co0-founder of Asana
Randy Fernando- NVIDIA (computer game company) Former product manager, mindful schools former executive director
Jaron Lanier- founding father of virtual reality and computer scientist
Roger Mcnamee- Facebook early investor
Johnathan Haidt- Social Psychologist
Cathy O'Neil- Data Scientist
Anna Lembke- Medical Director of Addiction Medicine