Agren Projects

Animating Conservation Practices

The Challenge:

Society as a whole has accepted the value of protecting its natural resources, yet there exists a wide gap between acceptance, true understanding, and conservation practice implementation. There is a clear need for new tools to communicate the importance and function of conservation practices that conserve and protect natural resources while making economic sense to farmers and landowners.

Agren's Solution:

Conveying the form and function of conservation best management practices (BMPs) is difficult because many of the core concepts, such as filtration or infiltration, occur underground or are invisible to the naked eye. 3-D animation is a rapidly-growing technology that offers a unique opportunity to convey the basic concepts of conservation in an innovative, visual format.

In 2005, M&M Divide Resource Conservation and Development contracted with Agren to prepare audio/visual scripts that could be used to create 3-D animations of selected conservation practices. The project required us to conduct extensive research into specific conservation BMPs prior to developing a story board for illustrating each practice to be animated. We wrote the audio scripts and created visual accompaniment in the form of photographs, graphs, diagrams and text for each frame in the animation.

We worked closely with a multi-media design and editing firm to achieve a final animation suitable for use with conservation planners as well as landowners and producers.