Britain's Prince Charles Using Interactive Broadband Video for Campaign to Save Rainforests

Britain's Prince Charles is using interactive broadband video as part of a new public awareness campaign for his Prince's Rainforests Project. The campaign seeks to "create a climate of awareness and public concern that encourages action to end tropical deforestation" by, among other things, encouraging people to sign up on a Web site (www.rainforestsos.org), to demonstrate their support for urgent action. At the core of the campaign is a 90-second public awareness video in which the prince appears with his sons, William and Harry, children from around the world, and various celebrities, including Harrison Ford, the Dalai Lama and Robin Williams (each of the people participating in the video appears alongside an animated frog that was designed by Framestore and that is intended to serve "as a symbol of the rainforest"). The video is being distributed on social-networking service, MySpace, and on a range of other Web sites.

The new campaign's interactivity is enabled by an application (note: the app was not yet live as [itvt] went to press) that will allow viewers to create their own mash-up version of the video, in which they themselves will be able to appear next to its animated frog and its celebrity guest stars (viewers will be able to share their mash-ups with their friends, and the mash-ups will also be posted on the rainforestsos.org site and YouTube). The app is powered by technology from Moonshine Media and the rainforestsos.org Web site was created by Blue State Digital (which previously provided proprietary software and online engagement strategies for Barack Obama's presidential campaign). "Our aim, with your help, is to build an online community to call, from the bottom up, for urgent action to protect the Rainforests, without which we will most certainly lose the battle against catastrophic climate change," Prince Charles said in a Webcast that was released just before a launch event for the new public awareness video at the National Geographic Store in London. "One of the Internet's strengths is that it can enable diverse communities to come together to ensure that everybody's views and actions can really be made to count. It provides the potential to create global determination for change on a vitally important issue."