Story of Bottled Water Makes the Case for Tap
One of this week’s unexpected viral stars wasn’t a cat or a girl in a bikini, but rather environmentalist Annie Leonard, whose rant about bottled water, released in conjunction with World Water Day, has racked up over 150,000 views on YouTube in one week. The Story of Bottled Water uses a clean, hand-drawn animation style and Leonard’s laid-back hosting technique to explain why tap water has been eschewed by American consumers over the past 20 years in favor of bottled; while unashamedly an anti-Perrier polemic, it’s still an effective bit of storytelling.
Leonard first became well known online thanks to The Story of Stuff, a 20-minute short film that first introduced the series’ trademark blend of animation and live-action and literally took on the American way of life — specifically the consumerism that drives people towards environmentally destructive behavior. Released last year, the short has only accumulated about 85,000 views, but did lead led to a book adaptation and a media tour that even included a stop on The Colbert Report. While the version of Story of Stuff hosted on YouTube under the storyofstuff account only has 85,000 views, the total of number of views, including multiple YouTube versions uploaded by other users and the official site, comes to over 8.5 million.
Judging on a purely viral level, the fact that The Story of Bottled Water is currently outperforming Stuff in its first week of release, but the fact that it’s has been more successful in finding an audience online isn’t too surprising, due to two factors: a shorter runtime — eight minutes — and a much more specific focus. Bottled water, after all, has become a major market in a very short period of time, and Leonard is very effective in breaking down not only how it happened, but why it means danger for us as a human race. (An earlier standalone entry, The Story of Cap and Trade, enjoyed similar success as well, reaching about 500,000 views across Vimeo and YouTube last December.)
There is a catch: While the Story of… style has plenty of charm and wit, it could stand a stronger use of fiction techniques to liven up the one-note lecture tone and steady pace. Each time I sat down to watch one of these shorts, I found myself losing focus after about four or five minutes; it’s not that Leonard isn’t an engaging host or that the subject matter isn’t interesting, it’s just that a little more drama goes a long way towards sustaining attention spans.
The fact that I would lose interest five minutes in, though, just means that I’d pause the video and finish it a little later. Because the pacing is only a small criticism of a project that has real value, both as a document of society gone amuck and as a example of how to deliver a message using video — and get people watching.
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