Deadline: February 5, 2024
Applications for the Planet Forward Storyfest Awards 2024 are now open. The Planet Forward Storyfest Awards highlight the voices of students, seeking to understand and illuminate their own innovations for how to best care for the earth. They are looking for stories that inspire, motivate, and drive change. Stories those are compelling, thought-provoking, and vibrantly stimulating. Be memorable, have an impact — and have fun.
They encourage students in journalism/film/media programs as well as students who have no formal media affiliation or experience to enter Storyfest.
Topics
These are the topic areas they’re hoping you will explore, and can reflect your studies, research, work, experience, or dreams:
- Food: How can they feed the planet, grow better food, and stop wasting so much of it?
- Water: How should they use it, conserve it, clean it, and get it to places that don’t have enough of it?
- Energy: What are new ways to get it, make it cleaner, use it more efficiently?
- Mobility: What’s a better way to get around, reduce congestion, and minimize the impact on the environment and the climate? What has changed since the pandemic, for better or worse, and how can they look forward?
- The built environment: How should everyone build for the future? What are the new materials, technologies or designs that will make better homes, offices, neighborhoods, cities and towns? How has the pandemic changed the view of city life?
- Biodiversity: How do everyone preserve and foster the vital ecosystems?
- Public health: What impact and takeaways can the environmental movement utilize from the pandemic and/or the response to it? How are climate change and the pandemic intertwined, and what can everyone learn?
- Climate justice: How can everyone better implement climate policies and environmental initiatives that provide fair and equal treatment to all communities, and prevent discrimination in the systems that perpetuate climate change?
Categories
- Best Short Video by a Media/Communications Student;
- Best Short Video by a NON-Media/Communications Student
- All video submissions should be one to eight (1-8) minutes in length with HD-quality audio and visual, and include an article, which should be fifty to two hundred (50-200) words describing the video without transcription. All video submissions must be uploaded to Vimeo or YouTube. If the entry is longer than eight minutes, a trailer must be submitted that satisfies the run time requirement.
- Best Multimedia Story by a Media/Communications Student;
- Best Multimedia Story by a NON-Media/Communications Student:
- Multimedia projects may creatively combine elements of photography, video, audio/music, and other forms of digital art as, for example, incorporated into an Adobe Express story. All photograph submissions should utilize digital images with a minimum of one hundred and fifty (150) dots per inch (dpi) and feature detailed captions, not to exceed two hundred (200) words for each photograph. Each multimedia project should include a short article. The written portion should be two hundred to six hundred (200-600) words and should summarize the submission. If a multimedia submission is prepared using Adobe Express or similar platform, an embed code and an additional written summary of one hundred to two hundred (100-200) words and one (1) photograph to be featured.
- Best Writing by a Writing/Journalism Student;
- Best Writing by a NON-Writing/Journalism Student:
- All written submissions should be six hundred to one thousand (600-1,000) words and include a minimum of one (1) image, where the image is preferably taken by the Entrant, and feature interviews with two to three (2-3) sources.
Prize
- Grand Prize: Travel with Lindblad Expeditions to see and report on the environment.
- The winners will travel with Lindblad Expeditions for an exciting opportunity to see and report on the environmental solutions, preventative measures, and innovations in a site of environmental significance.
Eligibility
- Planet Forward accepts submissions from people across the globe with all different points of view.
- You do have to be at least 13 years old to submit, and if you’re under 18 you need to have a parent’s permission.
- Before you post, you need to set up your Planet Forward account by answering a few simple questions about who you are and where you’re coming from. They do this because they’re a community and they want you to have the chance to share your story with as many people as possible.
- They also want to be transparent, so if you’re posting for a company, make sure that’s clearly reflected in your account information and in your submission. In any case, make sure they can all see who you are – fill out your profile information, let them know where you’re coming from, and let the community see exactly who is responsible for your great work.
Judging Criteria
Storyfest entries will be judged in four areas:
- Creativity and effectiveness of chosen format/s and storytelling techniques;
- Excellence in written/verbal communication and/or technical and production skill;
- Factual accuracy, including attribution of facts, data and quotes, and superior research that considers different perspectives; and
- Overall potential impact of the storytelling.
All submitted work will be reviewed by Planet Forward’s team of experts.
Application
For more information, visit Storyfest Awards.
