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 posters, 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, and buying notebooks and CDs inspired by our unfortunate tales, which also contributed to MNS’ funds.

We handcrafted four reimagined “unfortunate tales” using mixed media. Whenever possible, we used reclaimed wood, metal, cloth and other repurposed items, in keeping with our theme. We then photographed these sets, and combined them with digital illustration for use on our posters and print, for a raw, rustic look that couldn’t be replicated by illustration alone.These images and stories were then adapted to our notebooks and microsite.

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 posters displayed at our roadshow. The posters 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.