The Scientist's Warning

Numbers are tough. It’s hard to make data seem real, visceral and emotional. Yet numbers are telling us some incredibly important things. They tell us that we’re taxing our natural resources far beyond the planet’s carrying capacity. They’re documenting in very fine detail how we’re eliminating other species and even entire ecosystems. They’re showing us the ugly truth that we’ve become the agents of mass extinction and warning us about very dire things to come for our own species if we don’t change course.

But we face a challenge as storytellers: how do we make the urgency we are seeing in numbers and data seem real to our audience?

We’ve tried all the tricks before, and we’ll continue to do so. We’ll take the audience to the Brahamputra Delta in Bangladesh, where locals are struggling with seal level rise. We’ll visit overfished reefs in Hawai’I and burning forests in the Amazon. We’ll talk to the people who live in these places about their struggles with climate change, devastating weather, overpopulation and lack of access to natural resources. We’ll dig into stories. We’ll conduct interviews. We’ll share charts and maybe have another household voice read our voiceover as if it’s the truth.

But this is all the same approach that environmental films have been taking for a long time, and we’re still collectively failing to have an impact swaying opinions and building the sort of groundswell to tackle these issues head on.

So now we want to try something a little different. We want to tell where the numbers come from. We want to show audiences the real people behind the data. We want to break the stereotypes. Scientists who create these numbers are brilliant, erudite, unapproachable geniuses. They’re not hollow automatons who spend all of their waking hours staring at spreadsheets. They’re like any of your friends or family. Their passionate, committed, hard working, creative and fallible.

We want to demystify data and pull back the veil, and we’ve found the perfect character to help do that.

Bill Ripple is about as humble of a character as anyone you meet. He’s not flashy or controversial. He’s not a brilliant orator. In fact, he’s downright awkward on stage. He’s shy, soft spoken and quirky, but when he speaks, people seem to understand that he’s telling the truth.

Maybe this ordinariness is what has millions of people around the world listening to what he has to say. Maybe that’s why he’s filling auditoriums and recruiting.

And so our challenge as filmmakers is one of contrast. How can we tell the most important and dramatic story in the history of our entire species…the threat to the survival of humans on this planet…while staying true to the humble qualities of our main characters?

If we’re able to introduce Bill Ripple and the other scientists in this film the way that we know them, then we’re sure that the audience will rise to join them with their mission.