Great charity videos have been on my mind recently, having been asked to select my favourites of 2015 for The Guardian Voluntary Sector Network. As a mum of two young children, I was very moved by the new WaterAid campaign video, which launched this week.
It’s a dual-narrative film featuring One Born Every Minute midwife Delia Jepson going about her work at Liverpool Women’s Hospital juxtaposed with footage of midwife Juliana Msoffe in Kiomboi hospital in rural Tanzania. The film is a brilliant insight into how giving birth is such a different experience in each place, highlighting the challenge of delivering babies in a maternity ward which is among the 42% of healthcare facilities in Africa without safe water.
I asked Catherine Feltham at WaterAid about their approach to making the film and she told me:
“WaterAid had already made a connection with two of the midwives from the Liverpool Women’s Hospital who featured on One Born Every Minute, to go and visit Kiomboi hospital in Tanzania to see what the conditions were like for midwives like Juliana there. So I decided to ask if they would also be involved in our Parallel Lives film idea. We thought by making both an interactive piece and something featuring midwives from a recognisable UK TV programme that we would be more likely to engage a British audience.
We thought by making this an interactive piece it would have the most impact on the audience. We could have made a split-screen linear film but these are not new to audiences and might not have grabbed people in the same way. By allowing the viewer themselves to choose at what points they switch between Juliana’s day in Tanzania and Delia’s day in the UK we are allowing them to have a unique experience with the film. Different parts of the film will impact people differently so if we’d have cut it ourselves in a linear film we would have taken away the extra engagement the interactivity of parallel lives allows. It also allows real subtleties to come through as by making it interactive we can show the same activity/type of activity and how it looks in the two different environments.”
The video coincides with WaterAid’s Deliver Life appeal, where every £1 given by the UK public by 10 February will be doubled by the UK Government. Check out the trailer at the top of this post or watch the full film here.