Popcorn Brain gives Earth the last word in COP31 film

Created together with Rumble and Graffiti Agency, in less than two months, the film asks what happens when humanity fades from Earth’s memory

Earth remembers us. Our first words, our curiosity, the closeness we once shared. It struggles to recall when we started to drift apart. In Popcorn Brain’s manifesto film for climate change conference COP31, the planet looks back on its relationship with humanity, knowing that its own life will continue. With or without us.

The agency developed the film with Rumble (and Graffiti), the Turkish government’s lead agency for the project. The brief was to come up with a novel way to tell the climate story. It also asked the team to support Türkiye’s ambition to put implementation at the centre of COP31. Popcorn Brain approached that challenge through a personal question: when did we start behaving as though we are separate from the world we belong to?

A love story on Earth’s timescale

The narrator, Earth, recalls humanity with affection. As the story unfolds, those memories become harder to hold on to. Events merge and details disappear. What feels like an immense history to us, amounts to a passing moment in Earth’s life. The difference gave the filmmakers a way to shape the images. Chronology slips, periods overlap while the Earth and humanity began to lose connection. The prospect of being forgotten gives the film its emotional weight. Earth can survive the loss of humanity, but we cannot survive the loss of our home. But there is still time for the relationship to continue.

Filming while the idea was still being shaped

Popcorn Brain had less than two months to take the project from brief to delivery. To meet the ambitious timings, development and production ran together. Director duo Daniel Bruce and Sophie Friederichs assembled a mood film to establish the direction, with a plan to replace its reference shots with their own footage. Less than one week after script approval, they were on a plane to South Africa with director of photography Thomas Buelens.

VFX lead Nicolo ‘JEKO’ Santaniello and his team began testing shots as the visual world emerged. In the meantime, Sjoerd Limberger composed a set of musical components, while Kody Chambers built resonant instruments to explore different sounds. Research and strategy were led by Ivar Laanen, with creative direction and copy by Diego Molina. Bruce and Friederichs carried the concept through art direction and editing, working alongside the production, camera, VFX and sound teams.