Cinema of Change
In 2014, Prodigium Co-Founder Tobias Deml created a magazine together with Robert Rippberger, with the sole purpose of concentrating and disseminating information about social impact entertainment; this solidified the intellectual backbone of Prodigium’s impact entertainment.
What exactly is Cinema of Change? Here is part of its mission statement:
Filmmakers have classically created film to entertain, to make art and profit, to advance technology and narrative structures. There is a much greater potential within movies though, namely that films can change society.
Learn more at www.cinemaofchange.com .
SIE Society
In 2020, Prodigium Pictures co-founded the SIE Society together with other media industry leaders – the first-of-its-kind alliance (akin to a trade association) connecting all people and organizations actively engaging in creating change-making entertainment. At the society, we contribute to researching the science behind SIE, and furthering the use of storytelling as a tool for change. Our fellow heads running the society include Robert Rippberger, William Nix, Rebecca Graham Forde, Jeffrey Chao, Devon Dansky, Laura Herb and Christina Lindstrom.
You can utilize the resources we built in 4 primary ways:
- Use the Ecosystem to find 200+ organizations world-wide for co-productions, knowledge sharing and jobs.
- Use the Resource Library to learn essential knowledge – how does this impact stuff actually work? How do I make movies about mental health or climate change?
- Use the SIE Calendar to attend a wide collection of (virtual) events around the world to meet people and dive deeper.
- Register – yourself, your organization, or both! This allows you to dive deeper and connect with fellow SIE professionals.
Visit the website at www.siesociety.org .
Prodigium’s Social Impact Entertainment Research
- Prodigium continuously absorbs “what works” type of insights from psychology, advertising and media effects studies and re-purposes them for our entertainment and cause marketing work.
- We travel around the globe to stay on the cutting edge of impact research, such as attending the SBCC Summit in Indonesia in 2018, or visiting the father of entertainment-education in Mexico City.
- We maintain the world’s largest database of impact-oriented entertainment players (see below).
- We co-fund a lot of the R&D that goes into Cinema of Change.
- Our first feature film, Strive, is a good example of what Cinema of Change is and means – a film aimed at having both commercial success and social impact.
Ethical Marketing & Advertising Policies
Prodigium Pictures LLC is a certified B-Corp media production company. Prodigium is committed to exclusively produce marketing and advertising materials with a high ethical standard. We have a zero-tolerance policy towards utilizing fake news, disinformation, or false advertising in our work. All of our marketing work undergoes ethical analysis in content to prevent misleading portrayals and false stereotypes, while increasing inclusion across ethnicity, gender and ability. Our creative work has a mandate of being fact-driven, and focuses on the positive social and environmental values of businesses and organizations.
The Cinema of Change Ecosystem
Together with Cinema of Change, we developed and populated its ecosystem with 130+ organizations and companies listed:
The largest collection of major players in the Social Impact Entertainment space: Film Studios, Non-Profits, University Programs, Research Facilities and Funding Organizations that concentrate on the Social Impact of Entertainment.
Check out the Cinema of Change Ecosystem to find out about fellow organizations in our space.
Prodigium’s Social Impact in Japan
In late 2016, Prodigium Co-Founder Hiroki Kamada teamed up with Shuntaro Okamoto and co-founded VOOK, a dedicated online platform in Tokyo, Japan to teach Japanese filmmakers and grow the independent film industry in Japan. Before VOOK, the Japanese independent film community was extremely fragmented and knowledge was hard to come by.
In only 2 years, VOOK grew to become the biggest online platform for filmmakers in Japan with 120,000 active users. Hiroki has written over 100 articles that teach filmmaking knowledge and produced more than 20 video tutorials for premium users.
Together with Co-Founder of Cinema 5D and CEO of Adoir inc.
Impact Story Lab
In January of 2021, Prodigium Pictures hosted a free 6-week video marketing class for nonprofits called the Impact Story Lab. Over the course of the program, Prodigium’s team met with the selected nonprofits for weekly 90-min Zoom sessions (the program was conducted remotely due to pandemic safety restrictions and the varying geographic locations of the participants) where the cohort learned about the ins and outs of marketing video production, from ideation to production to delivering the final video product. At the end of the program, each nonprofit gave a presentation laying out a plan for their own social impact video project.
CAUSE MARKETING & STORYTELLING
Communicating about your company or organization’s CSR and social impact practices can be a tricky process that requires critical thinking and effective planning. That’s why our team, along with CSR expert Frank Connelly, created CAUSE MARKETING & STORYTELLING, a Free CSR Communication Toolkit to provide companies, nonprofit organizations, marketers, and storytellers of all mediums with expert advice and practical strategies regarding how to effectively communicate about their CSR programs and competently create social impact media. The guide will be available to download at SIE Society in March 2022.
