Our Storytelling Agency’s Top Birding and Wildlife Productions

Our storytelling agency has created birding and wildlife productions across the globe for a diverse portfolio of international clients. During the course of those projects, our team have become experts at filming wild animals and telling compelling and engaging stories around wildlife and ecosystems. Whether it’s stalking shy antbirds in the dark undergrowth of the Colombian Amazon jungle or getting up-close-and-personal with curious penguins on Antarctic ice sheets, we know what it takes to produce vibrant birding and wildlife video productions.

Here are WhereNext’s top birding and wildlife video productions:

Integrated Global Tourism Campaign

Project: “The Birders” Documentary Series

Client: Colombian Ministry of Tourism (ProColombia)

Location: Remote Colombia

In 2018, the Colombian Ministry of Tourism selected our storytelling agency to produce their 2019 tourism storytelling campaign. In winning this bid, a mixed private-and-public-sector selection committee unanimously awarded the contract to us over every major production and creative studio, both national and international, with offices in Colombia, including Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and Fox Studios.

This cutting-edge integrated marketing campaign included six documentary films, producing a “fam” trip, PR strategy, negotiation of partnerships with the Audubon Society and Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, development of an endless suite of digital-marketing still images and micro-videos, and film festival strategy. It launched in early 2019. Our distribution campaign broke the Colombian Ministry’s record (and perhaps any tourism ministry’s record) for organic likes and comments (more than 30 million) and successfully positioned the country as the world’s top birding destination.

Beyond the success of the film, The Birders told inspiring human stories. We didn’t want to make the typical wildlife documentary. What we wanted was to get to the heart of what birding means to the people who do it every day and what birds mean to Colombia as a country. This isn’t just a film about birds; it’s a film about survival, redemption, loss, and the journey of a country and its people back from the brink. That’s what makes it a WhereNext film.

The eBird digital campaign featured an innovative creative approach: we organized a contest in which users were encouraged to “bird” via the eBird app while watching The Birders, after which they could submit a list of the three species that most captivated them. The prize was an all-inclusive birding adventure for two on the Northern Colombia Birding Trail. The competition page was viewed more than 34,000 times, and there were a total of 9,226 contest entries. The newsletter sent out by eBird to announce the competition reached 2.9 million people and received 828,000 interactions, while the reach of eBird’s various social media channels topped 290,000.

We also organized a tour of the filming locations for ten tourism operators and two international journalists. Each tour operator who committed to offering the Northern Colombia Birding Trail received an innovative media sales video kit designed by WhereNext and accessed via a password-protected web portal. In the end, every single one of the ten operators on the fam trip committed to launching new tourism offerings in Colombia and has followed through.

This trip also resulted in major media coverage. BBC Wildlife published a feature story, representing huge exposure for birding tourism in a region that was, until very recently, considered unsafe for travel. The late Bill Thompson III, the legendary editor of Bird Watcher’s Digest, also dedicated a two-part episode of his highly influential birding podcast to the campaign after having visited Colombia as part of our trip. The Birders also inspired an exhaustive and highly impactful article in Outside.

To date The Birders has been viewed over one million times. It has been screened globally at bird fairs and film festivals, including two premiere screening events at the British Bird Fair, the world’s first and most important birding festival.

Read more about the project HERE.

Brand-Driven Award-Winning Social Impact Film

Project: “The Value of a Wild Heartbeat” Video

Client: Cat Footwear

Location: Oregon, USA

Our storytelling agency’s partnership with CAT Footwear has so far spanned five campaigns produced in four countries on three continents in a matter of months. We’ve brought innovative brand storytelling to the biggest product launches in the company’s history and have created integrated multi-channel marketing campaigns filmed in Mexico City, Valencia, Detroit, Bogotá, and Astoria, Oregon.

We created the Stormers campaign at the Wildlife Center of the North Coast, and it’s a sterling example of the WhereNext storytelling philosophy. A hallmark of our approach to story is finding passionate people giving their all to achieve their dreams and make the world a better and more exciting place. We are committed to finding the most engaging stories for our clients and matching those stories—authentically—to their products. The people of the Wildlife Center of the North Coast proved to be ideal: Joshua Saranpaa and his team of volunteers have dedicated their lives to protecting vulnerable animals. We knew right away that this was the perfect story for Cat Stormers. These boots are tough, durable, and most at home in wet conditions: just like the indomitable crew of the WCNC.

In 2020, WhereNext received five prestigious Telly Awards for the Surge On campaign. We were awarded a Gold Telly Award in the Online Commercials Campaign category and four Silver Awards in four branded content categories, including the Social Impact and Documentary classes.

Read more about the project HERE.

Sustainable Ecotourism Video Series

Project: Filming the Wildlife of Casanare

Client: USAID & Awake Travel

Location: Colombia

As a storytelling agency staffed with passionate adventure-sports athletes, naturalists, and tireless explorers, the WhereNext team relishes new filming challenges and the chance to explore wild and off-the-beaten-track destinations. So we jumped on the opportunity to partner with Colombian tourism agency Awake Travel and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on a series of video projects promoting up-and-coming ecotourism destinations in lesser-known regions of Colombia.

Our mission was to document the spectacular wildlife of the Colombian department of Casanare and create a series of promotional videos to promote the region at global trade fairs. Filming wildlife presents several unique challenges. For starters, our shooting schedule was limited to ten days, and we needed to capture excellent footage of the most representative wildlife of the Llanos in that time. Every hour and every animal sighting was precious. Our videographers had to maintain constant vigilance because wild animals don’t give an advance warning when they’re about to appear. This is no easy feat in the intense heat of the Colombian plains, but our perpetually curious and patient crew kept their eyes on the prize.

We also explored the Montes de María region with Awake and USAID. Filming in Colombia can often be tricky, but the Montes de Maria was a step beyond the norm: this isolated region presented a series of unique challenges. Transport infrastructure is not developed, and the area is new to tourism, meaning that many local guides are unaccustomed to meeting the rather specific needs of film crews.

Read more about our work with Awake in Casanare, Colombia HERE.

Urban Wildlife Educational Initiative

Project: La Bitácora Silvestre De Bogotá

Client: Discovery Channel and Animal Planet Latin America

Location: Bogotá, Colombia

In 2019, our storytelling agency produced and filmed a series of informative videos for Discovery Channel Latin America, Animal Planet and the Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. La Bitacora Silvestre de Bogotá was an exploration of urban wildlife and ecosystems in one of Latin America’s biggest cities. The pre-production of this series involved extensive wildlife scouting in the city as we determined the best spots to film wild birds and animals in an urban environment.

One episode of the series was entirely dedicated to migratory bird species of Bogotá, for which we had to shoot world-class footage of hard-to-film species like warblers and tanagers. Our previous experience of filming birds for The Birders was invaluable, and we obtained hours of quality footage of our target species. In another chapter, we became the first agency to obtain video footage of a rare species of catfish in the wild. The project was extremely successful and is currently being shown on TV and online channels across Latin America.

Adventure Travel Clothing Publicity Campaign

Project: Justification for Wanderlust Series

Client: ExOfficio and the South Africa Ministry of Tourism

Location: South Africa

In 2014, we produced a publicity campaign for American adventure clothing brand ExOfficio in partnership with the Ministry of Tourism of South Africa. The ministry’s objective was to showcase five newly developed regions in South Africa. ExOfficio was looking to promote their clothing products in authentic locations while demonstrating the benefits of the garments in a variety of climates.

We organized all the logistics for the campaign, including location scouting, local casting, and partnering with our team of South African wildlife guides and fixers. The shooting schedule began in Johannesburg and moved to Durban. There we created video and photographic assets of the client’s products along the coast. The next stop was Drakensberg to film spectacular mountain landscapes, then St. Lucia, where we documented an urban hippo population. Finally, we filmed the African Big Five as well as numerous other animals and bird species at &Beyond’s Phinda Private Game Reserve.

The assets we produced for this campaign included ten videos showcasing the ExOfficio brand being used in the distinct landscapes and climates of South Africa. We also provided photography and graphic design services to create the 2014 catalog, as well as trade-show marketing assets.

Digital Adventure Travel Series

Project: Positive Footprints, Penguin Conservation in Patagonia

Client: World Nomads

Location: Peru, Argentina

For five years WhereNext has been World Nomads’ go-to audiovisual and marketing partner for adventure travel, natural history, and cultural projects around the globe. Our storytelling agency has filmed over 30 episodes of their digital adventure travel video series, ‘Discoveries.’ Over the course of our work for World Nomads, we have filmed videos in Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Spain, Nepal, India, Japan, Vietnam and Australia.

During the course of our extensive work with World Nomads, we have filmed two wildlife-focused videos as part of the ‘Discoveries’ series: Penguin Conservation in Patagonia and Meet the Guardians of the Peruvian Amazon. The former was filmed at a large penguin colony and ecotourism center near Puerto Madryn, in Argentine Patagonia. It tells the story of scientists and penguin conservationists working to protect our oceanic ecosystems through the preservation of Magellanic Penguins, which are a vital indicator of ocean health.

The second video was shot in the depths of the Peruvian Amazon, in the heart of the exceptionally biodiverse Tambopata Natural Reserve. It tells the story of a community fighting against the tide of deforestation and illegal mining that threatens to engulf this mighty jungle and the wildlife that calls it home.

Read more about Peru project HERE and Patagonia project HERE.

Talk to Us

WhereNext is a full-service storytelling agency and production company with offices in Bogotá, Colombia; Seattle, Washington; Girona, Spain; and Portland, Oregon.

Learn more about our storytelling agency or contact us, and we can talk about how to create a world-class and creative birding or wildlife production.

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