Climate change now represents an existential threat to our civilisation. It is the defining issue of our times, and our actions over the next few years will have profound ramifications for all future generations, and for the rest of the higher life forms with which we share our planet. Wake Up, Freak Out –Then Get a Grip is an animated meta-synthesis of the most up-to-date scientific understanding of the impact of human activity on the climate.

Thoroughly researched with comprehensive references to the peer-reviewed scientific literature, the 12-minute film explains in the simplest possible terms the dynamics of non-linear change, feedback loops and tipping points in the Earth's climate systems. After examining the science, Wake Up goes on to look at some of the implications of this new understanding for long-term human welfare, and for mankind's ability to respond to this crisis in the time we have left.

The film has become a seminal text in the cultural discourse around the threat of climate change and the political responses to the crisis, with a long and busy life as a viral video on the Internet. At the time of writing, Wake Up, Freak Out – Then Get a Grip has been: viewed around 200,000 times on the Internet, and is still being watched by an average of 250 new viewers every day; it has been virally embedded on over 200 websites, from Greenpeace, WWF and the RSA to the Guardian Online; translated by volunteers into 18 different languages, with a further three in the pipeline; broadcast on community TV channels around the world, from New Zealand to the deep south of the USA and the mountains of Hungary; been incorporated into a range of climate change teaching resources, from going on a four-thousand-mile round trip of schools at risk from rising sea levels, to being included in the permanent 'Bug Life' display at Bristol Zoo; and included on the DVD extras of the climate change blockbuster The Age of Stupid.

'The little film with the stick-people? It’s very good. The science is right.' – James Hansen, NASA Goddard Space Institute
'Very impressive' – Guardian Online
'Brilliant and rather haunting' – Financial Times
'Imaginatively illustrated and extensively referenced… The science is solid… it seems clear from last week's climate congress in Copenhagen that we're on track for that scenario now.' – Nature
'Joining the noble tradition of DIY protest, like Norman McLaren's Hell Unltd, Murray's animated warning against irreversible climate change declares itself unrepentantly old school.' – Sight & Sound

Leo Murray MA (RCA), FRSA
www.wakeupfreakout.org
leo@wakeupfreakout.org
+44 (0)7834 768743