WWF's In Hot Water, created by NOMINT for COP29 2024, is a stop-motion film shot entirely on a thermal camera to show global warming's impact on ocean and
ARCHIVEWWF In Hot Water Brings Ocean Crisis to COP29 Through Thermal Stop Motion
WWF's In Hot Water is a 2024 stop-motion public interest film, created by production company NOMINT and released at COP29, that uses a thermal camera to depict the catastrophic effects of global warming on marine ecosystems, coral reefs, and coastal communities through the eyes of a young boy diving into a dying ocean.
The film follows a child who descends into an ocean initially alive with colour and marine life. As he reaches a coral forest, rising heat transforms the water around him — the palette shifting from vivid life to searing red, the coral bleaching into silence. The boy passes dying reefs, abandoned boats, and collapsing homes before breaking the surface to face a glowing, overheated horizon. The narrative is intentionally wordless, relying entirely on the visual language of thermal imaging to communicate climate urgency. Released on November 12, 2024, and timed to coincide with COP29, the film serves as a direct call to world leaders to phase out fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to renewable energy, as noted by WWF's own campaign documentation at Wwf Panda.
In Hot Water earns a Clapboard Score of 82 out of 100, reflecting its exceptional craft ambition, cultural timing, and measurable industry recognition. The film is the fourth and final instalment in a planned series that WWF and NOMINT began at COP26, with each chapter deploying a distinct physical production technique — melting ice, fire, smoke, and now thermal heat — to represent a different dimension of the climate emergency, according to nomint.com. This methodical, multi-year creative strategy distinguishes In Hot Water from single-cycle campaign thinking and positions it as a landmark in public interest advertising.
ARCHIVEWWF chose ocean health as the focal subject for its COP29 film. The organisation's selection reflects a deliberate escalation: earlier films in the series addressed Arctic ice melt, wildfires, and air pollution — each threat mapped to the year's most pressing policy debate. By 2024, ocean temperature and coral reef collapse had moved to the centre of climate science conversations, making marine ecosystems the logical culmination of the four-film arc, per Wwfbrand Panda.
The broader context in which In Hot Water operates is a growing and professionalised environmental communications sector. According to The Business Research Company, the global environmental, conservation, and wildlife-organisation market was valued at a growing figure in 2024, expanding at a compound annual rate that reflects rising institutional and public investment in environmental causes. Within this landscape, WWF competes for attention and donor engagement not only with peer organisations such as Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council but also with the full spectrum of purpose-driven brand advertising that increasingly occupies the same emotional territory. Greenpeace, in particular, has a long history of confrontational visual campaigns, while NRDC has invested heavily in digital content. WWF's creative differentiation lies in commissioning work that achieves mainstream award recognition alongside advocacy impact.
The timing of each film's release at a successive UN climate conference is itself a strategic mechanism. It ensures guaranteed news-cycle adjacency, a ready-made audience of policy influencers and journalists, and a cumulative narrative that rewards audiences who follow the series across years. According to shots.net, the series approach builds brand equity for both WWF and NOMINT in a way that single executions cannot replicate, transforming what might have been individual campaign moments into a coherent creative institution.
NOMINT produced In Hot Water using stop-motion animation photographed entirely through a thermal imaging camera — a technique that, to the knowledge of its makers, had not previously been applied to narrative stop-motion filmmaking at this scale. Every frame was captured in-camera, with no digital simulation of the thermal effect applied in post-production. As Marilena Vatseri, Executive Producer and Managing Director at NOMINT, explained to shots.net: each prop and 3D-printed character was precisely heated to convey the specific visual story of the ocean's crisis, with temperature becoming both the subject and the medium of the film simultaneously.
The 3D-printed characters and handcrafted ocean environments were engineered to hold and release heat in controlled ways, allowing the production team to choreograph the thermal palette frame by frame. Coral structures were designed to shift from cool blues and greens — registering as life — to the intense reds and whites that a thermal camera reads as extreme heat, mirroring the actual process of coral bleaching caused by rising ocean temperatures. The physical precision required for this approach meant that production was, by nature, a scientific exercise as much as a creative one, according to nomint.com.
The soundtrack amplifies the emotional architecture of the visuals. Radiohead's No Surprises — itself a song built on resigned, quiet dread — was reimagined with additional production by Neil Barnes of Leftfield, introducing a textural weight that underscores the film's transition from wonder to catastrophe. The choice of a well-known song rather than an original score is deliberate: familiarity creates immediate emotional access, while the reinterpretation signals that something familiar is now transformed, mirroring the film's own narrative, as noted in coverage by itsnicethat.com. Production credits confirm Marilena Vatseri as Executive Producer alongside the NOMINT studio team.
In Hot Water accumulated a substantial record of industry recognition across the advertising and craft communities. The film received gold awards at The One Show in Moving Image Craft and Production: Animation, at the Clio Awards in both Production Design and Animation, at the CICLOPE Festival in Animation, at the British Arrows in both Animation: 2D and Stop Motion and Production Design, at the Creative Circle Awards in Best Animation Design, and at the Collision Awards in both Lighting and Direction — all in 2024. This concentration of honours across geographically and institutionally distinct award bodies reflects consistent peer recognition rather than success within a single judging culture.
NOMINT reported more than eight million views in the film's first two months of release, though as noted by itsnicethat.com, this figure is studio-reported rather than independently verified. The series of which In Hot Water forms the final chapter has, according to Marilena Vatseri speaking to shots.net, accumulated more than fifty gold awards across its four films, including a Yellow Pencil at D&AD and the Grand Prix at the CICLOPE Festival for previous instalments. These cumulative figures, sourced from NOMINT's own public statements, speak to sustained rather than episodic creative achievement.
Structurally, the film's effectiveness rests on its alignment of medium with message: thermal imaging does not illustrate heat — it IS heat, rendered visible. That conceptual unity between technique and subject is the quality most frequently cited in creative industry coverage, including analyses published by creativebloq.com. For a public interest campaign with no product to sell, the measure of success is the depth of the emotional argument made, and In Hot Water's award record suggests that argument was received as both technically rigorous and humanly affecting.
WWF's In Hot Water is a 2024 stop-motion film created by NOMINT and released at COP29. Shot entirely on a thermal camera, it follows a boy through a dying ocean to show global warming's impact on marine ecosystems and coral reefs, serving as a call for climate action from world leaders on fossil fuels.
NOMINT produced In Hot Water for WWF. Marilena Vatseri served as Executive Producer and Managing Director at NOMINT. The film's soundtrack is Radiohead's No Surprises, reimagined with additional production by Neil Barnes of Leftfield, combining a globally recognised creative studio with established musical talent.
NOMINT photographed In Hot Water entirely using a thermal imaging camera. Every frame was captured in-camera, with 3D-printed characters and handcrafted props precisely heated to specific temperatures, making thermal heat both the subject and the production medium of the film simultaneously, according to nomint.com.
In Hot Water is the fourth film in a series WWF and NOMINT began at COP26. Previous films — Can't Negotiate the Melting Point of Ice, A Flammable Planet, and Up in Smoke — used melting ice, real fire, and smoke respectively, with each technique chosen to represent a distinct climate threat at each successive UN conference.
In Hot Water won gold awards at The One Show, the Clio Awards, the CICLOPE Festival, the British Arrows, the Creative Circle Awards, and the Collision Awards, all in 2024. These honours span animation, production design, direction, and lighting categories across multiple independent international juries, confirming broad craft recognition.
WWF timed In Hot Water's release to COP29 in November 2024 to maximise policy and media impact. Each film in the four-part NOMINT series has launched at a successive UN climate conference, ensuring adjacency to global climate negotiations and a concentrated audience of policymakers, journalists, and environmental advocates, according to wwf.panda.org.
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