Anna Jane Joyner’s Good Energy Nonprofit Story Consultancy Focuses on Climate Change Representation on Screen

Monitoring representation on our screens for issues like gender, race, language, religion, and any other component of humanity has been around for decades. Good Energy is a nonprofit climate script and story consultancy which has adapted the Bechedel Test (commonly used to measure gender representation) to monitor how the climate crisis is portrayed in creative and meaningful ways – full blown story worlds, to character attributes. You can read their annual Climate Reality Check report HERE.

We spoke with Good Energy‘s Founder Anna Jane Joyner about her work and how storytellers can benefit from it.

What’s your background in Climate Science?

I’ve been working in the climate space since college. I studied climate communications, but I come from a family of artists and storytellers.

My dad’s a megachurch pastor, which is a very specific kind of storytelling, but it’s definitely storytelling. My brother’s a filmmaker, two of my siblings, and my mom are musicians. So, I’ve always been drawn to art and story as something that evokes emotions and connection and helps us see ourselves and find meaning in the world.

During the first eight years of my career, I worked in the traditional climate world. It was started by great scientists and great policy makers, but there weren’t a lot of artists and storytellers in the climate space. I was always doing music tours and documentaries trying to bring art and story into the different kinds of work that I did in the climate space.

I slowly transitioned into Good Energy. I was in a Showtime documentary that followed me trying to convince my dad that climate change is real, which he did 20 years later. That was really the first effort to do cinematic storytelling on TV around climate.

It was with the producers of 60 Minutes and I treated it as a master class on climate realities. I wanted to know everything about what we are doing wrong on story and what we could be doing better. I’m an avid lover of TV and film. It’s a huge part of my family culture and I’m also a writer myself.

I started Good Energy seven years ago when I was struggling with a lot of climate anxiety, grief, and anger. I live in LA part-time and on the Gulf Coast of Alabama part-time, both very much on the front lines of climate change. I really like stories which find courage and make sense of really difficult things.

Climate Reality Check

The study and the tool that we developed and applied to the Oscars films is called the Climate Reality Check.

We chose the Oscars because it’s a limited amount of feature films that are scripted and really demonstrative what have been the most critically-acclaimed stories in our culture that year. It’s a small pool, but I think it gives us good data on where we are overall with climate depictions in feature films.

We did about two years of research and co-created it with a lot of our advisors and other TV and film writers to make sure that it would work.

We wanted something super simple that was not prescriptive of story. It just measured if climate existed in this story. We modeled it off of the Bechdel test.

It’s really about whether climate change exists in the world of this story. Does the character know it? It seems like we’ve been very heartened that it seems like it’s been a useful tool for people.

The tool got picked up by two studies in Korea. The London School of Economics used it to do a study on K-pop drama. Another film organization in South Korea used it on feature films there.

The Brazilian Writers Guild did one for their most popular films.

How Does The Tool Work?

When we’re consulting on TV and film, different events, workshops, and experiences, we offer writers the “Climate Lens.”

It’s basically just asking, if the characters were real people and how would they be experiencing climate change. If the show or film is set on earth, now or in the future, how would they be experiencing climate?

If it’s set on the Gulf Coast, what are the climate impacts? And then, looking a lot at the psychological and emotional research to think through how different characters would be feeling about it and how that would be showing up within their psychology and relationships. It’s about processing Climate Emotions.

In addition to the physical impacts and reality, we think of solutions. I don’t think about it as a cause-based approach. I think about it more like Hollywood Health and Society at the Norman Lear Center at USC which is one of our big partners.

What does it authentically look like for your story? How can we support you in your creative process, whether through research or connecting you with subject matter experts. In some films and TV shows, we were embedded in the creative process where we’re an ongoing resource. One of the first screenwriters we met, Alex Maggio, who worked on Madam Secretary, wrote the episode and I was just picking his brain.

He really coached me on how to make this easy, creatively supportive, and evocative. He told me very early on, screenwriters are really busy, so give it to them on a silver platter. That’s always kind of been my North Star.

The Pitt had a huge climate storyline this season.

Discuss the intersection of facts, entertainment, and dramatization in the Climate Reality Check.

Our first value is story first.

I would never ask a writer to put anything into their script that wasn’t authentic to the world and the characters that they were creating. The way that we approach it is much more what is the humanity of the story.

It’s less of what is this specific science or this specific technology? And more, what are these characters going through? How are they interacting with it?

If they’re a scientist, a clean energy entrepreneur or a policymaker, then there are many cases where you do need that more detailed minutiae. I’ve intentionally built my team with screenwriters, storytellers, and climate experts. So, we’re hyper aware of the need to dramatize some of the more technical aspects of this in a way that works for story.

It’s not good for climate stories if it feels shoehorned, preachy or boring.

Oftentimes, we have new writers think about how are they are experiencing this. What is the emotional landscape? If you’re a parent, how are your kids experiencing it? How is that affecting your relationships, your friends?

I think once you start approaching it more from the humanity of living in the age of climate change and less from the technical side, it really opens up a new creative toolbox.

Around 70% of Americans are worried about climate change. And the biggest percentage of them (I think it’s 46%) are very worried about climate change. And then it goes down to, I’m pretty concerned, but I’m not quite alarmed yet.

by Staff Writer

From our in-house editorial team.