Expert communications tools help Gore to forward his environmental campaign (repost from February 26, 2007, 11:18 am)

(Forgive me for reposting this week. Have got a lot of catch-up to do on other fronts...I hope it's still relevant to readers.)

On the morning after the Oscars, it makes sense to talk about some impressions I had about An Inconvenient Truth, now a multiple Oscar winner, including for Best Documentary.

Mr. Gore himself attended, even though, as far as I know, he was not instrumental in creating the film apart from starring in it. But they dragged him up onstage when Truth won. He even presented an award with Leo DiCaprio, where they yet again good-humouredly put Gore out as the guy who just can’t catch a break: after a few minutes of set-up by Leo, Gore began to deliver an “important announcement”, at which time the orchestra music swelled up behind him, drowning him out.

The film itself had started that set-up of Gore as the guy who won-but-then-(unfairly)-lost the last presidency. The interweaving of his unfortunate presidential history worked brilliantly to inspire empathy and open the ears of us viewers, so we’d more openly absorb the environmental message.

But it’s also the delivery of the message that struck me – essentially, the presentation part of the film was one of the most well-done PowerPoint presentations I’ve seen.

If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recall that Gore stood onstage, dwarfed by the huge presentation that filled the wall behind him. The only words on it were labels – headings, titles of the X and Y axes on graphs, top-of-screen titles – while the rest was a series of images.

The images were often charts and graphs, which moved to demonstrate rising earth core temperatures, for example. Colour was used powerfully, too, with those rising red temperature lines contrasting with the more benign, powder blue ones alongside that indicated the desirable cool temps.

At other points, those relatively more clinical diagrams would be replaced by mammoth photos of forests burning and glaciers melting, with the vivid reality of the photos shocking the audience to full effect.

Then, just when a viewer might start to feel her eyes glazing over, the film would cut to the more “biographical” elements about Gore’s political life leading to the point in time of the film’s making. You see, and start to feel, the frustration of Gore and his supporters as they year after year tried to put the environment on the American political agenda. By the time we’re back to the presentation part, it’s hard not to completely turn yourself over to accepting Gore’s arguments.

Indeed, if the rock star treatment the media gave Gore during last week’s Toronto visit and during last night’s Oscars are any indication, this down-and-out crusader for the underdog – he campaigned for literacy during the Clinton presidency, too – has reinvented himself into a powerhouse of influence.

Regardless of which side of the environmental argument you find yourself on, you have to admit that Gore clearly knows how to use the communications vehicles available to him to his full advantage.