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- WATCHER: Seeing Climate Change Through Different Eyes
Every tool leaves a footprint. The uniquely human responsibility is deciding what we do with it.
WATCHER: Seeing Climate Change Through Different Eyes
Daniels By Design teamed with Creative Director Anfon Ha to create WATCHER, a short film for the 2026 Prince George’s County Film Festival’s inaugural Climate & Environmental Storytelling Track. Told through the eyes of an osprey, the film turns a familiar local landscape into a meditation on environmental change, human choices—and our responsibility to pay attention.
The Challenge
Climate stories can easily become lectures. Technology stories can just as easily become demonstrations of the technology itself.
Our challenge was to do neither.
We wanted to create an emotionally resonant environmental story that felt unmistakably rooted in Prince George’s County—its waterways, neighborhoods, Black culture, history and changing landscape—without making the County simply a backdrop or turning the film into a government PSA.
At the same time, we wanted to explore what emerging generative filmmaking tools could make possible while confronting an important contradiction: traditional film production has an environmental footprint. AI does, too.
How could we use new tools to tell a meaningful climate story while remaining thoughtful about the environmental consequences of the tools themselves?
Our Approach
We began with a deceptively simple creative premise: pay attention.
An osprey became our watcher—an observer whose lineage has returned to the same waterways, trees and landscapes across generations. From that elevated perspective, changes that might feel gradual to people become part of a much longer environmental record.
Brand Strategy:
- We established WATCHER around a clear creative and strategic proposition: environmental change becomes harder to ignore when audiences are invited to see a familiar place from an unfamiliar perspective
- We positioned Prince George’s County as an essential character in the story—not interchangeable scenery—connecting its waterways, communities, Black cultural identity, history and changing landscape into one distinctive sense of place.
- We built the film’s message around human agency rather than environmental fatalism: people make choices that contribute to damage, but people also have the capacity to correct it.
- We also shaped the project’s human + AI positioning around augmentation, not erasure. Generative tools expanded what the creative team could visualize, while human strategy, writing, direction, performance, editing and judgment remained responsible for what the film ultimately meant.
Creative Storytelling:
- We constructed the film primarily from the osprey’s point of view—gliding, hovering and observing Prince George’s County from above—giving audiences a perspective that feels both cinematic and slightly removed from ordinary human experience.
- Working together, Bryan Daniels shaped the strategic narrative, cultural context and climate dimensions of the story, while Anfon Ha led its creative direction, visual development and generative production.
- A textured voice performance by Michael Taliaferro gave the watcher a wise, lived-in presence—less a narrator explaining climate change than an observer who has simply been around long enough to notice what people do.
- Sound, music, environmental detail and visual juxtaposition helped weave Black Prince George’s County identity naturally into the film rather than stopping the story to explain it.
Holistic Communications:
- We approached WATCHER as both a film and a larger communications idea: the environmental story on screen and the human-and-technology story behind its creation needed to reinforce one another.
- Generative imagery allowed a small creative team to visualize an ambitious, place-based narrative while human strategy, writing, direction, performance, editing and judgment remained at the center of the process
- Most importantly, we avoided presenting AI as an environmentally consequence-free alternative to conventional filmmaking. Different tools create different footprints. The responsibility to understand what we use—and why—remains human.
The Results
The finished WATCHER transforms a local environmental story into something broader: an invitation to notice how landscapes change, how seemingly ordinary choices accumulate over time and how people remain capable of both damage and repair.
Only after audiences have experienced the film on its own terms does its production method become part of the message. The imagery was created largely through generative filmmaking tools—but the places, environmental concerns, cultural context and creative choices behind them are real.
Submitted for consideration to the 2026 Prince George’s County Film Festival’s Climate & Environmental Storytelling Track, WATCHER also serves as a demonstration of what can happen when human creativity and emerging technology are treated as collaborators rather than substitutes.
SOLUTIONS
Client
- Prince George’s Film Office
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