Just Like Trees

The American Forest Foundation (AFF) is a national conservation organization that offers help to private and family-owned forests. Families own the largest portion of U.S. forests, yet most of the landowners inherited the land and never received professional assistance from a forester. KSV partnered with AFF to develop a campaign to bring awareness to their organization and the importance of protecting our most powerful resource in the fight against climate change, our forests. The biggest challenge our agency faced was finding a way to make an authentic connection between trees and humans and to demonstrate the power of the relationship between the two. We fell in love with London-based, mixed media artist Chris Kenny’s Twig Saints. His emotive and incredibly gestural figures are made entirely of twigs. Their expressive nature felt raw and uncomplicated. They were the perfect vessels to tell our story. Each figure was carefully selected and placed into our environment based on its body language. We matched the twigs to the gestural reaction to one of three treats we were about to amplify: fire, weather, and insects. The vibrant sounds of birds chirping were quickly replaced by the crackling of fire and the roar of rain as the twig stick figures struggled to stand their ground resulting in a heartwarming film that illustrates the cries from our forests for help. We, like our beleaguered trees, had to triumph to call attention to the devastation to prevent further erosion and harsh climate issues. Thankfully, we did. The six-week campaign resulted in 647,000 video plays, thousands of visits to AFF’s website and as an added bonus, thousands of dollars in new donations.