We chose to use what all Malaysians are familiar with – classic fairytales – and reimagined them in a world without trees. These tales served as a conversation starter to show how deforestation can ruin these stories, as well as ours.

We brought these stories to life through our mobile mechanised booths, which together with the rest of our campaign, drove to the microsite. Once there, people could dive into each tale further and learn about how deforestation affects us, as well as take action by donating, signing up as a member, sharing our message and buying notebooks and CDs inspired by our unfortunate tales, which also contributed to MNS’ funds.

We built our reimagined “unfortunate tales” by hand in 3D using mixed media. Whenever possible, we used reclaimed wood, metal, cloth and other repurposed items, in keeping with our theme. These sets were built into a booth with moving gears.

At a touch of a button, our stories came to life with the mechanical action of the gears, as well as specially composed music timed to the movements. Copy embedded on the sets within each booth talked about how just like deforestation is ruining our fairy tales, it is also ruining our land in the real world. People were then encouraged to visit the website, where they could take action by donating, signing up as a member, sharing our message and buying notebooks and CDs inspired by our unfortunate tales, which also contributed to MNS’ funds.

As the campaign was recently launched, we’re still collecting the results, but so far the response has been encouraging. Both young and old responded positively to our campaign. In just a few days, 22,000 were exposed to our tales on our mobile mechanised booths displayed at our roadshow. The booths played a key role in our campaign’s success, which helped increase deforestation awareness by 48%, and raised over RM45,000 within the first week of launch. More importantly, Malaysians were encouraged to join MNS in its quest to rewrite nature’s unfortunate tale in the real world.