Green Guardians| Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Summary
In this hackathon, we create a documentary that helps raise awareness about sustainability to all generations. This was achieved by prefacing challenges like Human Overpopulation, to then focus the documentary on 'Fast Fashion' and 'Vegan Diet', and was concluded by discussing about Global Warming and how we can fight against it.These topics in specific were chosen as a majority of the viewers are influenced by these unsustainable daily activities, which they can choose to eliminate from their lives, to be better global citizens.
How We Addressed This Challenge
The challenge given at hand was that "there is concern worldwide that environmental issues we face today will have an impact on future generations. The challenge is to create a way to communicate the importance of environmental responsibility to people of all ages."
Our team members collectively decided that in order to most effectively communicate the message of sustainability, the best medium to do so, would be through making a short-form documentary that focuses on real-life actions that the viewer can then participate in, if they support our cause as well.
We chose to make a documentary, because this form of video content is considered to be one of the most response-generating mediums to communicate to your audience. Also, to make our documentary more effective, we made it much more bite-size (duration of 10 minutes), this way the user can get the gist of our message and value being propagated in a matter of minutes. This tactic is especially helpful as the younger generations these days have shorter attention spans, thus it is very hard to grab their attention and interest them for an hour (which is the normal length of a documentary). This way, we have planned towards having higher audience retention and will keep the viewers for longer on the documentary.
With this documentary, our team focused on starting the documentary by introducing the challenge faced by humanity today: Human Overpopulation. Since the only way we humans can ethically fight the effects of overpopulation is through sustainability, this reason was why we decided to introduce the documentary with this problem.
Quickly the team transitions the focus into fast fashion. What it is, Why it is bad, and What we can do about it were some of few topics that were explored. Similar topics were discussed in the field of diet, where the documentary suggests the viewers to follow a vegan diet to live a sustainable life with a low carbon footprint, as well as what it is and why it is beneficial to our society.
We aim to promote this documentary through the social media accounts of the team members. We plan to share the click-bait and the most dramatic and hyped scenes which would act as trailers to the actual documentary. We are planning to do this, as the short form trailers will enable us to tap into an audience with very short attention spans, yet are interested to watch the 10 minute documentary to learn something new.
With every piece of work we as a team do and put our efforts into, we hope that it inspires positive change in society and helps people in need. In this context, we really hope that our viewers get educated and aware about these uprising issues and its solutions, through which we can all live sustainable lives and keep some resources for the future of tomorrow.
How We Developed This Project
We were initially inspired by this specific challenge, as all three of our team members are first year Computer Science students, and so are not that comfortable in developing applications. Therefore, we chose this challenge as it allowed us to focus on our skill sets and creativity to come up with any solution we would like that could actually drive some change in the world.
But as we continued along this topic, we realised how we could explore so many topics in such interesting ways to be able to enforce the idea of sustainability to all generations.
Our approach throughout while making this documentary was the integrity of our team and the message we stand for. We always kept our message first. While team discussions and debates about ideas, we would always select the option/route whichever will let us best portray the message we want to propagate through our documentary.
For creating this documentary, our team used IMovies (a free movie editing software on Apple Computers). Using this technology, it was so easy to operate the sounds and edit the video clips. While, I was slow to begin with, I quickly got the hand of the software and was able to navigate the tools and presets.
Our biggest challenge as a team was the physical distance we have between us, this not only makes it difficult for all of us to collaborate, because a movie can only be edited on one computer at once, but also the time differences made it tough to coordinate at times. However, through all of the challenges we faced, we realised that we all had to make some sacrifices to be able to give this hackathon and our project the absolute best we can.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We were highly dependent on the space agency data in our project mainly for the changing rates of global temperature, CO2 emissions, methane emissions, glacier melting, sea level rising, global warming graphs and forest fire clips to enhance our data representation and easy presenting.
Overall, using these essential statistics and visuals, it helped raise the level/standard of our documentary.
Project Demo
With this documentary, our team focused on starting the documentary by introducing the challenge faced by humanity today: Human Overpopulation. Since the only way we humans can ethically fight the effects of overpopulation is through sustainability, this reason was why we decided to introduce the documentary with this problem.
Quickly the team transitions the focus into fast fashion. What it is, Why it is bad, and What we can do about it were some of few topics that were explored. Similar topics were discussed in the field of diet, where the documentary suggests the viewers to follow a vegan diet to live a sustainable life with a low carbon footprint, as well as what it is and why it is beneficial to our society.
To conclude, the documentary ended by discussing about Global Warming and how we can fight against it, through minor changes in our daily activities.
Data & Resources
OUR DOCUMENTARY: https://youtu.be/F4j9peYoZZc
https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/225/video-methane-sources/
https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/223/sea-surface-temperature-sst-from-january-2016-through-march-2020/
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/res/Sebastian_HeatIsOn.pdf
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGF3ObOBbac&t=408s