Helping social innovators increase their impact through short film
At Micro-Documentaries we have the pleasure of working with hundreds of social and environmental innovators around the world. We work closely with you to translate your vision into compelling story frameworks, to produce short films that invite your audience to become part of your vision and to train your teams to master the craft of storytelling for social innovation. Our team of documentary filmmakers are committed to leveraging the power and beauty of short films to move your mission forward.
Solution trailers of sorts, our films have inspired audiences to give online and US senators to move legislation forward. They have motivated people to give and have encouraged corporations to commit to extraordinary social action. They have been shown on the NASDAQ jumbotron in Times Square, in the intimacy of the White House, on stage at Carnegie Hall, on the online pages of The New York Times, in film festivals, on television and on hundreds of thousands of screens around the world. Purposeful businesses and nonprofits like Bono’s [RED], eBay’s Social Innovation team and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital count on Micro-Documentaries to engage their audiences in a way that is authentic, affordable and actionable.
Our story
Founder and Creative Director, Natasha Deganello Giraudie was a teenager when she started volunteering on Friday afternoons serving children in the most vulnerable neighborhoods of her native Caracas. The warmth and the possibility she experienced at that young age made her feel fully alive and resulted in an lifelong interest in following the footsteps of those who were building a better world for all of us.A few years later, Natasha got a taste of the potential of applying her love for visual storytelling towards humanitarian and environmental missions. As a journalism student at Stanford she received the Donald Kennedy Fellowship for Public Service which sent her to Nepal to photographically document the work of local children’s organizations. As a recent college graduate she worked on the small Expedición production team in Venezuela, filming adventure documentaries that were distributed on the Discovery channel.
Filmmaking was still done with actual film at the time, so while technology advanced to overcome its high-price obstacle, Natasha started a software company in Silicon Valley, Papilia, to help large and mid-size nonprofits raise millions of dollars while improving the way they stewarded their donors. While the results were encouraging, she noticed that even though social innovators have some of the best stories to tell, they often struggled with storytelling.
In this way, when digital filmmaking finally opened up creative possibilities that were previously cost-prohibitive, she imagined how she might bring the power of beautiful, cinematic documentary storytelling to everyone who was trying to make the world a better place. Micro-Documentaries was born at the end of 2009.
Deeply influenced by Stanford’s culture of innovation and public service, and coincidentally by its contributions to the invention of filmmaking, The Micro-Documentaries team has pioneered what has become a high-growth industry while innovating on a new film genre. In a few years, Micro-Documentaries has produced close to two thousand films in more than 30 countries, and has trained hundreds of social and environmental change makers in the art of storytelling for social innovation.