PROJECT One Piece A Day | CLIENT dkstudio | SERVICES Creative

“One person picking up one piece of litter a day is nothing but a million people picking up a piece of litter a day can change the world.” – Dmytriy Pereklita

Imagine if one million people stopped to pick up one item of trash every day. How different would the world look and feel? Dmytriy Pereklita, founder and CEO of the One Piece a Day app, hopes to one day find out.

One Piece A Day is a non-profit mobile app designed to promote environmental awareness and sustainability by encouraging users to pick up one piece of litter every day and log their progress. Snap. Log. Dispose. It’s that simple. As users take pictures and log the litter they pick up, the app then tracks the overall contributions from users worldwide so people can see the impact they’re making.

We were asked to share One Piece A Day’s journey to help get them closer to their goal of one million users. Our aim with every story we create is to find that hook that will inspire audiences to care and respond to the call to action. As soon as we interviewed Dmytriy and his colleague, Tamara Conway, their passion and dedication to their work blew us away. It was clear to us their journey was our story.

We wanted the audience to better understand Dmytriy’s inspiration for building this app. By capturing that sense of upset and futility he first felt when cleaning up a littered beach on his own, realizing that the bags and bags of garbage he collected was a drop in the ocean to what was needed, we aimed to connect viewers to that common human feeling of isolation and hopelessness; leaving them wanting to do their part.

Filmed entirely in Toronto, we take viewers into Dmytriy’s world, recreating that moment at the beach, following his process through to the app’s creation, then finally seeing him and Tamara venture into schools in order to educate youth on the problem and how they can be part of the solution. Shot in a documentary style, we employed expressive sound design to heighten the emotional impact of each moment as it unfolds.