Case study · Bertelsmann Foundation and Aspen Ministers Forum · 2021–2025
Five years of crises, told by the people who lived them
Madeleine Albright, Susana Malcorra, Federica Mogherini, Jan Eliasson, Bobi Wine: each Leadership in Action episode is an interview, and we animate the passages that dramatize their account.
4
seasons, from 2021 to 2025, with animation by the same studio
10
published episodes, with former ministers, a former UN deputy secretary-general and opposition leaders
11×
the views of a typical 2024 video on the channel, for the Bobi Wine episode (63,712)
01 · The result
The series premiered at the Aspen Institute in February 2021: Madeleine Albright, George Papandreou and Marina Kaljurand discussed their episodes in a session moderated by Edward Luce of the Financial Times. It ran for four seasons.
- The Bobi Wine episode reached 63,712 YouTube views: eleven times a typical 2024 video on the channel, with double the channel’s usual likes per view.
- It was an official selection of the Oregon Documentary Film Festival and the American Documentary Film Festival in 2026.
- All three first-season episodes beat the channel’s typical video, with 1.6 to 2.3 times its usual likes per view.
- The series has 252,000 YouTube views; 134,000 across the nine episodes with no sign of paid promotion.
note: These are public YouTube metrics, checked in September 2026. The Marwan Muasher episode (118,000 views) has almost no likes, so it was probably promoted, which is why we count it separately. The second-season episodes fell below the channel’s typical video, though above 2022’s, a weak year for the whole channel.
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The challenge
The Bertelsmann Foundation and the Aspen Ministers Forum wanted to show how a leader decides in the middle of a crisis: the cyberattack on Estonia, Ebola, the Iran nuclear deal, a campaign under threat in Uganda.
The starting point is always a long interview recorded by the Foundation. Many of these stories have no footage: they happened behind closed doors, in someone’s memory, or where there were no cameras.
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The decisions
Their voice, not a narrator’s
There’s no narrator. Each leader tells the story in the first person, and animation appears only where the account needs it: to dramatize a moment, not to decorate the interview.
Illustration where there’s no footage
Bobi Wine’s childhood in Kampala’s slums, his mother, the night of a vote: what nobody filmed is told in painted illustration, with a warm palette that sets it apart from the present.
The same format, season after season
One interview, one crisis and a few animated passages in the same style. The format held for four seasons, so every new episode reads as part of the series.
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What it would cost today
The episodes run about 15 minutes, but we charge only for what we animate, not for the episode’s length. Each one carries about 3 minutes of animation.
3 min × US$1,500 = US$4,500 per episode