Corona's CSI focus is on ocean plastic. But how do you get people who don't live near the ocean to care about it? We needed to tell a story that showed how plastic from cities makes it way to the seas.

The objective was increased awareness around ocean plastic and the story of Johannesburg's waste pickers that prevent plastic from reaching the oceans.

We sent pro big-wave surfer and ocean activist, Frank Solomon, hundreds of kilometres away from the ocean to surf the mean streets of Joburg with an intriguing group of surfers doing some incredible work to keep our oceans plastic free. Together they form a friendship across cultures and class. The film culminates when Frank shows the Street Surfers, Mokete and Thabo, the ocean for the first time and shows

We wanted people to come to this story as a piece of entertainment, and not just a piece of advertising, so that its story could have more impact. To achieve this we submitted the film to film festivals, which served two purposes. One; this helped position this story as short film and not a piece of advertising. Two, film festivals are an extremely underused channel that helped us talk to our target market of cities in a brand new way.

This positioning helped us run the film on Nat Geo as a piece of content and not as advertising.

The film launched at a small premiere at the World Surf League in Jeffries Bay, and on YouTube, on July 11 to get various members of the surf community behind it.

After that, the piece was entered into over 30 film festivals around the world, such as London Independent Film Festival, DC Environmental Film Festival and Barcelona Environmental Film Festival, as well as airing South African Nat Geo on November 5th.

As of writing, Street Surfers has premiered in over 30 film festivals and was aired on South Africa's Nat Geo channel. Online viewings of this 9 minute film have exceeded 1 million viewers.

In South Africa, spurred by news stories around the movie that resulted in over 8 million impressions, the narrative around waste pickers changed from an annoyance and a menace to people that are actually carrying out something vital to the country.