WORLD
MONUMENTS
FUND
Objective: To develop international heritage organisation World Monuments Fund’s brand strategy by aligning its brand voice with its reputation and goals to grow relevance and awareness among new donors, while remaining relevant to current ones and existing international community. Goal of updating current tone of voice (academic), messaging (vague/overly general) and content formats (mainly long form copy) in time for the launch of the brand’s new website.
Approach: Helped identify and clarify target audiences, and crafted a new brand tone of voice and messaging strategy in line with it. Conducted cultural research and advised on alignment. Audited existing communications materials and approaches on- and offline, and developed new brand and copy guidelines for tone and messaging. Actioned this strategy across formats and surfaces: supported website content design and user journeys, wrote brief templates and production guidelines for film and social media content production, and creatively guided outputs (copy, graphics, stills, web design) produced by the internal creative team.
Solution: Identifying a younger, cultured generation of future donors as the brand’s target audience, I drove a strategic shift away from WMF’s academic tone of voice, towards direct, meaningful communication aligned with the interests, profiles and adjacent media consumed by that audience. Developed bolder, clearer and more personally resonant messaging while remaining credible, politically neutral, and refined. Wrote, edited and guided in-house copywriters to craft educational and inspiring web and social copy highlighting the organisation’s global impact and centring the people connected to its work and its links to wider cultural, social and political points of interest.
Recommended piloting new brand strategy to test audience reactions via a short documentary film and social content campaign focused on one WMF sites, which I directed & produced. Drew up evergreen briefing materials for visual direction and production for consistent, lean creative production in the future.
Result: Earned a positive response from stakeholders, including board, advisors, leadership, donors, and site-specific team, leading decision makers to commission another 5 film assignments at different WMF sites below).
Delivered web copy & content embodying an accessible, direct, aligned tone of voice. In-house team fully briefed and functional in delivering multimedia assets under new brand guidelines.
WORLD MONUMENTS FUND WEBSITE | FILMS:
✯ Potager du Roi, Versailles
✯ Mosul Cultural Museum, Iraq
✯ Angkor Wat, Cambodia
POTAGER DU ROI, VERSAILLES
This short film takes viewers inside Versailles’ vegetable garden, through quirky and intersectional histories through touchpoints that audiences might recognise: Louis XIV and his lavish tastes, and its lasting impact on French cuisine today.
A film raising awareness of the impact that climate change is having on the gardens, straight from the heart of the action: gardeners, the researchers, the professionals who are helping this incredible cradle of nature and culture to adapt.
CREDITS
Director & DOP - Issabella Orlando
Production Company - Aetia Studio
Assistant Camera - Nora Jaccaud
Editor - Issabella Orlando
Colourist - Conor Tychowski
Music - Ben McElroy
Stills Photographer - Nora Jaccaud
ANGKOR WAT,
CAMBODIA
A short film about the work being done to preserve the iconic archaeological site of Angkor Wat, and its impact on the local community through a human lens.
Capturing interviews with the last generation to recall Angkor Wat during Cambodia’s wars and genocide, this short docuemntary tells the story of a temple’s cultural, religious and economic significance to a community in recovery.
FILM PRODUCTION APPROACH
STORYTELLING: Moving away from fine-grain academic details, more widely interesting stories of the living culture that continues at Angkor Wat today was brought into focus: the people who tend to them, and the resilience of communities healing post-conflict through culture.
CAPTURE: I remotely directed the capture of Buddhist rituals, social histories, personal memories and the progress made over 3 decades of work. Interviewed elderly voices on the ground and translated their accounts into English for the first time.
ARCHIVAL WORK: Combed a huge repository of archival images and video, and resurfaced forgotten assets to paint a full picture of the cultural site before, during and after its restoration, and illustrate the visible progress made.
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CREDITS
Director - Issabella Orlando
DOP - Etienne Boisson
Production Company - Aetia Studio
Editor & Colourist - Joseph Rubio
MOSUL CULTURAL MUSEUM,IRAQ
Through interviews with artists, students, architects and cultural preservationists, we told the story of Mosul and its recent years of cultural revival.
A short documentary taking audiences on the journey from destruction to recovery in Mosul, through its beloved Cultural Museum.
FILM PRODUCTION APPROACH
STORYTELLING: The museum’s story is most often told through the lens of its destruction by ISIS in 2015, with little more than a brief introduction about its life before available. I wanted to tell the museum’s story beyond the attack; how creatives and culture were responding 8 years later, and what the museum represented today. The films connect this site of WMF restoration to several inspiring wider contexts - the incredible Iraqi Modernist movement of the 70s, and the strengthening cultural pulse in liberated city of Mosul today.
CAPTURE: Gathered interviews with artists, heritage professionals, architects, and photographers to share creatives’ and cultural professionals’ lens on Mosul’s destruction and liberation. Scrubbed hours of existing footage and archival materials to tell the story with minimal need for additional filming, for lightweight & small budget production.
AUDIENCE COLLABORATION: Incorporated input from students and young people whose cultural identity is forming post-occupation, through interactions with the museum and its collection
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CREDITS
Director - Issabella Orlando
Production Companies - Aetia Studio & Qaf Lab
Editor - Issabella Orlando
Music - poetri
