See Through Network Founder and professional gift horse distributor Robert ‘SternWriter’ Stern reveals the origin story of a global climate network that measurably reduces carbon, zero-budget.

The second of three articles by See Through Network’s founder on the creation of a climate action collaboration for ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’. Its tone demonstrates the flexibility and purpose of See Through’s ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’ methodology’. Just as ‘businesslike’ CVs dehumanise us, prioritising money before all else is making us drown, burn and shrivel.

By Robert ‘SternWriter’ Stern

Part 1: Zig-Zagger describes the Founder’s pre-Network career and what it taught him

Part 2: Smuggler identifies the storytelling secrets the Founder applied to the Network

Part 3: Activist reveals how these experiences lead to the Network’s unique zero-budget model

The art of the deal

Apart from actual begging, I reckon independent documentary filmmaking is the begging-est business.

Making a living from it honed my powers of persuasion, deal-making and pragmatism. Failing to make a living from it taught me even more.

Both experiences informed what has become the See Through Network.

Let me explain…

If you’re unfamiliar with the world of documentary filmmaking, I’ll be giving you a sneak peek inside the TV sausage factory. Even if you’ve been inside the factory, the dark arts of pitching a documentary idea to a broadcaster are just a deeper shade of the ‘art of the deal’ implicit in all human interaction:

• Barter: you wash, I’ll dry 
• Promise: of course I’ll love you in the morning
• Tariff for goods or services: I’ll buy you a diamond ring my friend, if it makes you feel all right

From playground to COP meetings, all negotiations are variations on the theme: 

I want A

You want B

Why don’t we agree on C?

Say ‘negotiate’, and we think of business deals involving money. But we only invented debt 5,000 years ago. We’ve been ‘negotiating’ in other currencies for 300,000 years.

‘Negotiation’ specialists come in many forms: game theorists, evolutionary biologists, behavioural psychologists, preachers, hustlers, advertisers etc.

‘Negotiation’ is an unpleasant business because it involves compromise. You don’t get A, and must settle for C. 

Explicit and implicit ‘negotiations’ underpin any human interactions requiring us to concede something. It could be for personal gain, or for some greater public good. So long as you don’t have a spear or gun pointed at you, you’re doing a deal.

Negotiation is not meant to be fun. Literally. The Latin root of ‘negotiate’ means ‘not-enjoyable activity’ – i.e. it’s the negation of ‘otium’, or ‘leisure’.

This might explain the role my professional experience of negotiation played in:

• The See Through News strapline being ‘Fun. Friendly. Factful’
• The See Through Network operating without a bank account
• The See Through Methodology walking the tightrope between radical transparency and devious manipulation

My zig-zag career both predicts and informs my ‘crossing the river by feeling for the stones’ approach to developing the See Through Network.  

But my zigs and zags didn’t prepare me for activism without money. I’d been employed, had been self-employed, and had made films about all sorts of activists without ever considering its disadvantages. It was a surprise because hardly anyone has ever tried it:

If you remove money from the equation, negotiation gets a lot more fun, interesting and liberating, and reveals unexpected benefits.

Being 100% driven by people working pro bono frees The See Through Network to:

• pursue our carbon drawdown goal without being tethered by the strings that come attached by money. Money is a form of control. Not requiring it minimises compromising A in order to achieve C.

• focus 100% on our Goal without money’s distraction and inefficiency. If you like your job, imagine only doing the fun stuff. None of the tedious money hustling, accounting, reporting, auditing, negotiating etc. If you hate your job, imagine spending your spare time engaged in climate action that doesn’t require shaking tins or filling in funding applications.

• enjoy not having any competition. There are thousands of climate activist charities and NGOs out there, but how many operate without money? Other climate activists have good storytellers too, but we have the Best Story.

If you’re curious how this unusual situation came about, read on.

You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, well, you might find

you get what you need

Come on baby, do the negoti-ation with me.

Some variations on the negotiation theme:

1. Toddlers screaming for ice-cream
2. Teenagers explaining to their parents why they need their own car
3. Village hall committees applying to the council to fix the roof
4. Defence contractors bidding for an aircraft carrier tender

The underlying ‘mind games’ are the same, but the balance of power creates different dynamics in each case:

1. Toddlers hold a strong hand, dealt by evolution. The pitch and volume of their screams are programmed to get their parents to feed them. 
2. Teenagers hold similar genetic cards, but usually need a semblance of an argument to get Mum and Dad to cave.
3. Village hall committees all apply for a grant, knowing every other eligible hall is doing the same. Council funding is finite, so they must prove they’re a special case.
4. Defence contractors can bid with both parties knowing only a handful of competitors could realistically build an aircraft carrier. Their strongest cards are rarely their price

Some types of negotiation select bolder colours than others in the negotiation palette. 

Toddlers deliver their ‘pitch’ in a great splodge of primary colour. Documentary filmmakers, as I found, require a wider spectrum of more subtle shades to induce anyone to pay them to tell stories.

The ‘pitch’ to the paymasters is just the biggest in a long and complex chain of interlocking negotiations: 

1. Pre-pitch negotiations secure exclusive access to the story to make sure you’re the sole supplier.
2. Post-pitch negotiations deliver on the ludicrous assurances you had to make in 1. to convince the paymasters to cough up

The margin for success is very narrow. A single failed negotiation link could sink the entire project.  

At the heart of any pitch is the story you want to tell. 

The story of how my zig-zag journey lead to the See Through Network is a story about the pros and cons of following the road less travelled.

Specialisation & adaptation

When I tried explaining my new career in doc filmmaking to friends who worked in ‘business’, they never quite got it.

I remember one patent lawyer, after a long attempt, saying, ‘Ah, I see now. It’s what I call a ‘luxury’ job’. A financier friend concluded ‘filmmaking sounds more like a lifestyle choice than an industry’. 

‘Yup’, I’d reply.

Having once inhabited their world, as a globe-trotting salariman, I shared their bemusement.

Apply standard business metrics to documentary filmmaking, and it’s really not the kind of business you’d invest in. 

In 2006 Google paid ex-PayPal pals Chad Hurley, Jawed Kareem and Steve Chen $1.65Bn for the video platform they launched a year before – YouTube. Before long:

• Demand for content was exploding, thanks to social media.
• Customer revenue was plummeting, thanks to social media’s business model creating viewers who expected content to be free.
• Old media budgets were shrinking, as new media leached away their advertising revenue. 
• Competition was growing with every new media studies/TV production student graduating, believing their expensive degrees were a vocational qualification.

As the Internet sucked the blood from the broadcasters, canny filmmakers had two ways to improve their odds in the doc-pitching Squid Game:

• Specialise in a particular field.  A track record and network of contacts in natural history, entertainment, politics, music, military history etc. means not starting each pitch from scratch. If you hit a rich seam, keep mining it.

• Redefine ‘documentary’. When Wife Swap emerged in 2003, it was called a  ‘constructed documentary’. At the time, it was innovative, sensitively made, and I enjoyed it. As ‘constructed docs’ turned into ‘reality TV’, Wife Swap turned out to be the first envelope-pushing nudge that led to the reality format mire we wallow in today. For filmmakers who wanted to stay employed, the further the envelope was pushed, the starker the choice between taking the money and taking the high road became.

Doubly screwed

Neither of these options helped me.

I was too curious to stick to one topic, and too precious to make reality TV (and would have sucked at it).

The Curiosity thread running through my zig-zag life means that while I have deep respect for specialisation in others, my own inclination is to discover something new rather than repeat something old. Eclecticism, or jack-of-all-tradery, is in my DNA.

My zig-zag career has granted me access-all-area passes to a wide range of human endeavour. Cumulatively, they’ve informed the See Through Network.

My patchwork includes my experiences immersing myself in the parallel universes inhabited by Mongolian sailors, Arctic Tamils, cave-dwelling Chinese peasants, Nicaraguan coffee farmers, Toyota chairmen, Stockholm night-club owners, Russian folk virtuosi, US Presidents, and Malaysian prime ministers.

When I was in a business that wanted more of the same, eclecticism was a handicap. Now it’s turned out to be a great advantage when it comes to climate activism storytelling.

My other handicap-turned-advantage was my distaste for formatted factual shows. I like watching, and making, old-school ‘observational documentary’: no presenter, no narration if possible, let people tell their own stories as directly as possible. 

As I entered the doc business, ‘ob-docs’, where the storytelling is done in the producing, directing and editing rather than in voiceover or captions, was falling out of favour. 

Broadcasters increasingly favoured celebrity presenters, as they brought a guaranteed audience with them. 

In hindsight, I should have spotted this trend while I was filming my very first documentary in 2000. 

The local producer I worked with for The Mongolian Navy: all at sea had just finished working on PBS’s Wild Horses of Mongolia With Julia Roberts. 

He told me a story about some local herders who’d spent the day camped outside their ger (yurt) where they were filming. They sipped on fermented mare’s milk, swapping observations as the unusual events unfolded.  The grasslands always had grass, plus livestock when they moved them there to eat it.  But, until that day, never Hollywood stars, entourages, cranes, dollies and wranglers. 

In an idle moment, my producer walked over to ask them what they thought of it all. After due consideration, they said they didn’t think the horses the funny-looking woman was riding all day were up to much.

I still find this funny, but the joke was on me. 

What those nomads didn’t realise was that for non-Mongolians:

• most people are more likely to watch something because it has Julia Roberts in it than because it has great horses
• production companies’ share value largely depended on their ‘reality’ format IP, even if it was little more than [Insert Animal’ with [Insert Celebrity]

When I entered the doc game, there was still a market for old-school ‘ob docs,’ but even then, making a living from it demanded artistry using subtler and darker shades of the negotiation palette.

So how did this climate-concerned documentary filmmaker, with a family to feed as I stitched my zig-zag, patchwork quilt of a career, jump through these narrowing hoops?

Inside the sausage factory

Because documentary filmmaking is fun and interesting, supply vastly outstrips demand.

Even pre-Internet, there were way more people wanting to tell visual stories than were prepared to watch them. Even fewer prepared to pay anyone to make them.

This supply/demand imbalance is reflected in professional filmmaking’s pitching and haggling process. 

Persuading clients to pay for your filmmaking services is not the same as, say, pitching for a toilet-cleaning contract, or a broadband supplier touting for your business. 

Thousands of talented filmmakers scrap for every penny. Funding pools are few and shallow. You’re only as good as your next idea.

My ‘80s zig, as high-flying salariman at the world’s biggest company during the Bubble Economy, was awash with cash. My ‘90s zag, as a salaried TV news producer in the heyday of network news TV, was all about ‘getting on air’, not ‘getting the money’.

Stumbling into the freelance doc ‘industry’, I soon realised money was the first, last and biggest, issue. Getting the money required relentless haggling and deal-making.

To make a living at it involved two parallel negotiations:

• the external haggle, with the broadcaster or funder, to convince them to pay me to turn my idea into a doc
• the internal wrestle, with my own conscience and self-respect, about how much I was prepared to prostitute my ideals to put food on the table.

External haggle

Muggles may be surprised at how little time filmmakers spend making films, and how much time they spend writing, pitching and generally hustling.

On paper and in person, most filmmaking time and energy goes into some form or other of persuasive communication. Nearly all of which is devoted to Getting The Money.

This demands mastery of many languages. I milked my Chinese and Japanese for all they were worth, but I’m talking about other dialects and registers you need to master even before you shoot a single frame:

• Creative: let’s match-frame dissolve from a black-and-white archive photo of the Victorian magistrates court to Marie standing on the stairs, holding her kids’ hands,  before the court’s final ruling, with the song her mother sang at the gallows for background music.

• Commercial: the broadcast rights to that song would blow our entire music budget in 10 seconds, unless we can persuade the rights owner to waive them for our doc. 

• Logistical: the perfect match-frame angle is from the roof of the former town hall opposite, now an accident insurance company HQ. Can we sweet-talk them into letting us film on the roof by tomorrow without all the health-and-safety forms?

• Technical: to get a full-frame match we’d need a longer lens than the hire company provides as standard. Could we get away with zooming in and sharpening the image up a bit in post-production?

• Marketing: this feels like the doc’s iconic still, containing all the story’s key elements and implicit narrative tension in a single image – should we Photoshop a mockup and put it at the top of our 1-pager pitch? 

• Financial: the broadcaster we’re pitching to now only funds 50% of the budget. Australian TV might stump up 15% without sticking their oar in too deep, and that Scandi film fund once bunged us15%. That would cover our costs but leave us working for free. Should we risk self-funding the balance and hope we get it back in international sales?

Like a UN translator, I flipped between these languages dozens of times a day, depending on who I was trying to get to do what when.

Like a psychoanalyst, or hostage negotiator, this required careful listening and a detailed understanding of the other party’s needs. 

Most demanding were the crunch negotiations with the purseholders, usually in the form of broadcaster commissioning editors. 

These were typically high-status people, under extreme pressure to deliver ratings, who couldn’t go to the toilet without someone pitching to them.

Their requirements were vague, often contradictory. They can be summarised as ‘same but different’, but examples would be:

Your doc must follow our format but be distinctive

Your doc must be commercial, but take risks

Your doc must follow the story wherever it goes, but be delivered in three months

Your doc must have genuine jeopardy, but you must tell us now exactly how it ends

The same combination of arrogance and irrationality, in other words, that characterises greenwashing business and the powerful men in suits they’ve captured. 

Like TV execs, business bosses and politicians are driven by fear and greed. They may utter fine words about ‘the planet’ or ‘our children’s future, but their main metric is money, not emissions, or any other Sustainable Development Goals.

So, you now know the context in which I tried to convince broadcasters to pay me to make the films I wanted to make, and with whom I was haggling.

My main ‘passion’ (mandatory term in any documentary pitch) was the deepening climate crisis. The people from whom I was Getting The Money, however, were rather less passionate about it than me.

This made the ‘sell’, already hard, even harder. 

For a glorious decade or so, I wasn’t even aware how lucky I was to get in the door at Japanese public broadcaster NHK. 

You make your own luck

Not for the first time in my life, the hard yards I’ve invested in speaking and reading ‘difficult’ languages paid off. 

You can call it luck, but it’s the kind of luck earned by years of study.  

My broadcast-level Japanese helped me become a trusted and regular supplier of documentaries about Europe for NHK. There were thousands of more qualified, more experienced doc filmmakers than me in Britain, but only a couple of them who spoke and read Japanese to be able to work natively in the language.

Just as important, however, was the familiarity with Japanese corporate culture I acquired in my first career as a textile trading salariman. 

Closing the first sale is especially hard in risk-averse Japan. The upside comes once you earn trusted supplier status. The more you keep delivering the goods, the more you’re trusted the next time. 

There’s nothing inherently Japanese about this. If a new stall appears at your regular market, it might take a while before you stop by to take a look. Longer before you try one of their pies. But if you like your first pie, you’re likely to return and try a different one. If you like that one too, it won’t be long before you’re buying pies there every week.

At first you might quiz the stallholder closely about the ingredients and their provenance, but as time goes on you grow more relaxed. After a succession of equally delicious pies, all to your taste, you start saying ‘just surprise me, I’m sure I’ll love it’.

This is normal behaviour everywhere except the ultra-competitive world of indie docs, but I was blissfully ignorant of this when I landed my first NHK doc. You’ll hear about my rude awakening in Part 3.

While the other indie doc filmmakers dreamed of getting 10% of their story ideas commissioned, by the end of my decade making films for NHK, my hit rate was around 90%.

The more docs I made for them, the more they trusted me to come up with stories their, largely silver-haired, viewers liked. My stall selling European pies, artfully seasoned and wrapped for Japanese taste, thrived.

This trust enabled me to follow my environmental passion far more frequently than I could have got away with with other broadcasters. Among the 5-6 films per year NHK commissioned from me, were:

• Pioneering zero-carbon architect Bill Dunster, taking on Britain’s volume house builders
• Organic veg box entrepreneur Guy Watson, freeing farmers from the stranglehold of the supermarkets
• The Netherlands’ radical response to increased flood risk, ceding land to the rivers, after centuries of building bigger, stronger dikes.
• NE Spain’s embrace of wind turbines, to virtually zero opposition.
• Catalan toymakers and Dutch furniture designers creating beautiful, unique objects of desire and delight from material they found in rubbish dumps and recycling centres.
• Raptor conservationists entertaining Brits to raise funds that preserved endangered vultures in Pakistan

Stealth sustainability smuggling

The Japanese public was no more impassioned about the environment than anyone else. 

I wasn’t pitching to specialist environmental strands, so I had to offer up a wide range of pies, from music (subversive ukulele maestro) to culture (English storytelling revivalist) and society (third-generation Irish matchmaker).

But even if I landed a commission for a non-environmental film, I’d find ways to smuggle sustainable themes in anyway:

• Arctic Outdoor Preschool (now available for free on See Through Together) revealing the Forest School movement’s ground zero. (Made for Japanese  adults, the English version won a Children’s Programme award at an Arctic film festival.)
• Norwegian living national treasure Amy Lightfoot who solved the puzzle of Viking sails  through oral history and living within her environmental means.
• London beekeepers connecting city dwellers to nature and the environment via urban apiary.
• Overachieving school orchid clubs in rural Somerset, trained in post-doc techniques to propagate critically endangered orchids they collected on trips to remote habitats in the Amazon, Sikkim and Indonesia.

These films showcased examples of community and altruism, created by people motivated by values other than money. They were also Trojan Horses marked ‘History’, Education’ and ‘Lifestyle Trends’, to smuggle in my environmental obsession.

Broadcasters and viewers routinely characterised the kind of people I made films about as ‘extraordinary’. But the more such stories I looked for, the more I found.

Maybe volunteering, altruism and community spirit isn’t so extraordinary after all.

But before we get to how these lessons were successfully applied to the See Through Network, it’s time for a bit of failure.

Google Ate My Lunch

My NHK teat began to run dry when the 2011 Fukushima tsunami/nuclear leak turned Japan introspective. Their appetite for my umami-flavoured European pies soon disappeared.

I found myself scrapping with all the other indie doc filmmakers.

Emerging from my Japanese-language niche cocoon, I encountered a brutal, tough world where talent and experience were a precondition for success, but no guarantee.

As the noughties entered the teens, the Internet started eating more and more of old media’s lunch. Documentary filmmakers, usually at the bottom of the food chain, were first to go hungry.

Like most of us, filmmakers had a poor understanding of the con our new Silicon Valley Overlords were pulling. Like regulators, governments, old media and consumers, we fell for their ‘free services’ schtick. 

By the time we’d clocked their free services were cunning bait to induce us to give away content so they could harvest lucrative data, it was too late. 

Like Big Oil’s ‘carbon footprint calculator’ move, social media publishers pretending to be ‘platforms’ by badging copyright theft as ‘disruption’ was bold Transparent Trojan Horse framing. 

I noted, and grudgingly admired, their cunning storytelling strategy, which now forms the basis of the See Through Network methodology.  Learn from the best, but back then I still had a family to feed.

As Google, Meta and Bytedance became unicorns, starving old media nags became skeletal, were cannibalised, or wound up in the glue factory. 

Advertisers, and their money, followed the eyeballs. Surviving broadcasters and film funds had less and less money to pay the likes of me to tell new stories.

Technology, avarice and blindsided regulators all narrowed the options for anyone, like me, trying to make a living from their creativity. The alchemy of making something from nothing hadn’t changed. Who ended up clutching the gold had.

Poor choices got worse by the day. Budgets shrank. Supply outstripped demand. Multitasking, once rare, became obligatory. 

For me and my indie filmmaker tribe, choices became increasingly stark: 

• Retire
• Retrain
• Risk becoming a ‘partner generating original content’ on your own dime

Rather than join the vanquished, I tried to exploit this ‘digital revolution’. 

I ducked and dived, and briefly bucked the trend. 

My journalistic instinct to run towards a crisis paid off for a couple of years, when I became an early adopter of crowdfunding.

By 2013, Litmus  Films had produced two of the UK’s top five crowdfunded documentaries, both on the pioneering, industry-bucking Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

These docs, about a band of deadpan subversives wearing dickie bows and playing genre-busting covers on ukuleles, contained a subtle green Trojan Horse. The band’s defiance of music industry norms included being among the only authentically low-carbon bands, as they avoided planes and travelled with their instruments as hand baggage.

But then it was third time unlucky. 

In 2013 I tried crowdfunding a more overtly sustainable documentary. After starting to film a year in the life of ‘Britain’s greatest living woodsman’ at my own expense, I returned to the crowdfunding well to find it crowded and poisoned. My Ben Law’s Woodland Year crowdfunder bombed. 

I stopped hiring fellow-filmmakers at mates rates, and took over the filming myself, while I hawked it around the broadcasters and digital channels.

By now they were obsessed with ‘reality shows’, rather than showing reality. And no one had any money anyway.

As an observational documentary storyteller, I was in the wrong business. Washed up. A has-been.

Internal wrestle

For years, my Japanese gravy train had insulated me from the harsh reality of convincing strangers to pay me to make my ideas.

After my NHK bullet train hit the buffers, I’d ridden the crowdfunding branch line for a bit, but now that too had run out of steam.

Now I was joining the Internal Wrestle club.  High-minded filmmakers choosing between making a living, and making the films we wanted to. With each pitch, the wrestling match between my conscience and anyone still prepared to pay me, grew more one-sided.

We all have to make a living, but the nature of indie doc filmmaking adds a complication that doesn’t apply to, say, self-employed roofers or plumbers. 

Getting a doc from a paper ‘treatment’ to broadcast requires a command of all the negotiation languages mentioned earlier, connections, luck, persistence. These are all things self-employed roofer and plumbers need.

But the one essential quality that’s required of a filmmaker, but not a roofer, is what everyone used to call ‘passion’. 

You always needed resilience to withstand the attrition of funders, repeated failed pitches, and the market chipping away at your cherished story idea. But even the most resilient filmmaker has their breaking point, and I reached mine.

Longstanding colleagues were gritting their teeth working on reality TV shows to pay the mortgage, giving up on even considering themselves as journalists or truth-seekers, re-training as teachers, counsellors, or teaching courses to young people destined for the same disappointments.

Those seemed like the only options, along with stacking shelves at a supermarket.

The Low Point

Screenwriters call this next bit ‘the low point’. 

In fiction, this ‘third plot point’ is where the hero hits rock bottom. All Is Lost…until an unexpected (but plausible) Inciting Incident comes along. This triggers a stunning shift from Act II’s Tragic Failure, to Act III’s Redemptive Climax.

Real life is messier, but as I found, the most fragrant roses can grow from great piles of steaming manure. 

By 2020 a lifetime of saving, a student lifestyle, and prudent investing permitted me to release my adult daughters into the wild well prepared for life without a mortgage to pay or urgent need to keep making money.

But as the See Through Network demonstrates, money isn’t everything. Working in a dying industry while the planet grew hotter by the day was not leaving me in a ‘good place’. 

By the time Covid struck, I had been clinically depressed for years.

Defeated by our Silicon Valley Overlords’ remorseless rapacity, I’d long given up on broadcasters. 

My increasingly desultory efforts to make a living as a storyteller sputtered. 

Videos for NGOs in Guatemala and El Salvador earned little, were highly stressful, and lead to nothing.

I was struggling to land work, and struggling harder to do it when I landed it.

A social media rebrand as ‘SternWriter’ and a return to writing sparked an old passion. After all the faff, gear, and hassle of making TV, just tapping away at a keyboard was a much simpler way to tell stories.   

Financially, it was a leap from the frying pan into the fire.

Print media was even more screwed than telly. It had been even more gullible, falling for the Silicon Valley Overlords’ blandishments that giving away their content for free was the future.

My clickbait-obsessed local newspaper, in its third century of publication, was now owned by a New York hedge fund. 

They wouldn’t even take SternWriter’s local nature-based whimsy when I offered it for free.

Another dead end.

**

In Part 3, Activist, Robert juggles climate, storytelling and money, drops some balls, before stumbling across different kinds of gold mine.