It is awards season in the movie world. Most of the talk might be about The King's Speech, Blue Valentine and Black Swan. However, your favourite animal protection charity has pulled off an awards win of our very own. OneKind scooped an MVA!
"What is an MVA?" I hear you cry. To answer this I will have to take you all on a journey back to summer 2010. Admittedly, this is quite a short journey, but you should still pop your seatbelt on. OneKind was due to launch on 10th October 2010 (10.10.10) and we just had to ensure that we did something befitting this new chapter in our proud history.
John Robertson (our Web Manager) had the very thing. One evening, while watching District 9 at home, John hatched upon the idea of They're Here. He quickly sold his concept to everybody else at OneKind, swept along by his obvious enthusiasm for such an ambitious and exciting project.
OneKind teamed up with talented Edinburgh based producer and Scottish BAFTA winner, Matt Brown. Matt turned John's astounding concept and storyboard into a film, creating the exciting and emotional journey which thousands worldwide have now taken.
They're Here focused on the awakening of feelings inside the human characters. The first is the recognition that like us, animals have special abilities - that one might almost describe as 'alien'. The second is that we're not that different to our animal cousins - we're all sentient, we all think and we all feel.
The video helped launch OneKind to our existing supporters and opened up the door to an array of new members too. We began to build a compassionate movement, on our way to creating OneKind world.
The film created an online buzz, with many people speculating that it was an alien invasion movie tied into J.J. Abrams or Spielberg. These rumours were brought about by teasing our online following with several homemade trailers and distorted segments from the film.
My favourite rumour was that it was a movie which involved Mark Hamill in a Looking for Eric style film, in which he played an imaginary version of Luke Skywalker. Movieviral.com covered our campaign extensively and carried out interviews with us before (with the mysterious pseudonym, Paul T Geist) and after launch.
Movieviral.com have now awarded us The Christoper Johnson Award for our film (ironically, Christopher Johnson is the name of an alien from District 9!). The Movieviral award (MVA) is given to an outstanding viral which deserves recognition but is not linked to a TV show or film. It is superb recognition for the concept and the social media work our team carried out during the launch.
If you haven't seen the film, please watch it below and leave your feedback.
Of course, OneKind cannot deliver any of our exciting campaigns and programmes of work without your support. Please give what you can to help us build a world, where people understand we're not that different.