Educational campaigns can be difficult to get rolling, but The Story of Stuff Project did an amazing job at captivating its audience. It’s especially difficult to do when trying to inform viewers about serious topics such as carbon emissions, plastic wastes, and pollution. The overall tone of the website is whimsical, fun, and inviting… and when I first arrived at the site I was excited to explore it more. The fun hand-drawn looking graphics along with a similar “sketchy” font created an environment that gave off a positive energy. Although the information on the website and the videos is about informing viewers on the negative impacts that humans and their consumption have had upon the environment, it was still presented in a positive way to try and inspire the viewer into helping their cause.
The sketched graphics used in the videos did a great job at not only illustrating what Annie Leonard was talking about, but also by helping to group topics and ideas together for the viewer to better “see” what was being discussed. Because the graphics looked like sketches, they reminded me of something that I might see on a Saturday morning cartoon, illustrating the point of how the sketches were inviting. The website gave off a sense of “cleanness” through the use of a lot of white, a little black and gray, and a few pops of color also added to its inviting effect. Although I thought that Annie Leonard was a great personality and was able to make very dry topics sound very exciting and interesting which helped to better engage the viewer, I don’t think that having her on camera during the movies was necessary. In fact, I think that the movies might have been even more effective if only graphics were used. The graphics were very informative, but I think that Annie distracted from the graphics in the frame at certain times, which hindered the viewer from extracting the most information out of the movie.
One Response to The Story of Stuff Project