Film and Animation for Research and Public Institutions

We make films that carry scientific content: animated explainers, documentaries, interview films and hybrid formats. We work for research projects, public authorities, foundations and NGOs, the clients whose subject matter has to keep its meaning when it is translated into pictures. You get a finished film, from the first idea to the final cut, in the length, the look and the register your audience needs.

A climate institute and a film school in one company: Climate Media Factory was founded in 2011 as a spin-off of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung) and the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf). Scientists and media professionals work on the same content here, which is why the physics still holds once the script has been simplified. Our films have been translated into fifteen languages, have won at the Deauville Green Awards and been screened at the Goethe-Institut's Science Film Festival, several have passed a hundred thousand views, and they are still used in classrooms years after they were made.

What we deliver

Animated explainers. The format for a concept that has no footage: a mechanism, a model result, a piece of policy. Script, design, animation, voice, sound.

Documentaries and interview films. Researchers, stakeholders and the people a project is actually about, filmed on location, in the field or in the workshop.

Hybrid formats. Live footage and animation in one film, where the subject needs both the real place and the invisible process.

Series and multi-part formats. Several films on one subject, built to be used separately and together.

Versions and localisation. Subtitles, language versions and cuts of different lengths for the channels a project uses.

How we work

As a production company. We have taken many films through the whole process as the producing company: the first idea, the script, the design, the shoot, the post-production and the delivered film. A single company is responsible for the result.

With a network across all the crafts. Camera, animation, post-production, composers, voice talent. That is how the look, the register and the pace get cut to what a particular audience needs, instead of to what a fixed in-house team happens to do well.

With filmmakers in other countries. For the Climate Vulnerability Monitor impact stories and other projects we worked with filmmakers in the regions the films are about and assembled the material here. If you already have people on location, we can work with them. If you do not, we find them.

At the scale you need. A two-minute explainer and a documentary series are different projects, and we have done both. Tell us the budget and the occasion, and we will tell you what is possible inside it rather than what it would cost to do everything.

What we need from you. The subject, the audience, the occasion, and someone who can answer questions about the content.

Earlier work

• Forests for the Future, filmed for 3FOR at a stakeholder workshop in the Brandenburg state ministry, 2024.
• Climate Vulnerability Monitor impact stories from five particularly vulnerable regions, made with filmmakers on location, 2023.
• Fritten for Future?, an animated series on climate-friendly food that is still in use in schools, 2020.
• Co-Benefits of Climate Action, 2018.
• Rossby Waves and Extreme Weather for the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 2016.
• Human Power, which turned the planetary guard rails of the German Advisory Council on Global Change into a short film, screened at the Foresight Film Festival and Cine'Eco, 2015.
• Science Year 2015: Cities of the Future, five short films that reinterpreted urban space with street art.
• Paradise Worth Saving on water management in the Caribbean, 2015.
• Knowledge and Action, a documentary for ICLEI on climate impacts in Asian cities, 2014.
• Engineering the Climate for the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, 2014.
• Outlaws in Air City, an animated western about the co-benefits of clean air, screened at the Deauville Green Awards and the Greenstorming Film Festival, selected for the Think Forward Film Festival, 2013.
• The Value of Soil for the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative, 2013.
• Earthbook, which asked what Planet Earth would post about humans and passed 250,000 views in three weeks, 2012.
• We Know Enough, premiered at the GIZ workshop at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, since translated into fifteen languages, silver Deauville Green Award 2012.

All of it is on our YouTube channel.