A global response to a global crisis

Only a couple of months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization came to Blink with an ambitious project: documenting the Covid-19 response efforts carried out by the organization and local ministries of health in ten countries worldwide. The World Health Organization has been promoting and fostering healthcare worldwide since its founding in 1948. For the first time in its existence, and at a time where everyone was looking to WHO for answers on the pandemic and the organization needed to counter unprecedented misinformation, WHO turned to Blink to develop a global-scale video and photo production effort and find a new voice to engage a younger, more diverse, and ever-growing audience.

In the following eleven months, the project evolved into an ongoing partnership between Blink and WHO covering all aspects of the organization’s response to Covid-19, its collaboration with governments all around the world during the pandemic, its continued support to long-term programs aimed at providing healthcare for billions more in the rest of the decade and, lastly, the rollout of the Covax vaccine - the United Nations’ global effort to ensure an equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines worldwide. For this project, Blink made it a point to work with local crews - not only because most borders around the world were closed during the pandemic, but to make sure that the storytelling was crafted and owned by local and diverse talent, capable of providing the most valuable knowledge and expertise. Working with lean crews was also a necessity, given the newsworthiness of the stories and the difficult access to the high risk environments we were filming in, such as hospitals and health centers. Blink producers and local crews worked together 24/7, across all timezones, offering flexibility and speed without sacrificing the cinematic quality of the footage and the sharpness of the photography. Blink produced over 65 stories between short films and photo essays, in more than 40 countries, providing WHO content for countless social media outputs and broadcast newsreels, and contributing to the organization’s perennial archive. Working in tandem with WHO headquarters in Geneva, and coordinating communication with local country offices, regional offices, ministries of health and even heads of states, Blink coordinated production from A to Z: from the initial development of each story idea to sourcing crews, briefing them on the ever-changing creative and technical needs of the project, ensuring quality and continuity throughout the series despite ongoing challenges, to finalizing the post-production and timely delivery. Stories produced include: the provision of oxygen concentrators in Somalia, the distribution of the first Ebola vaccine in Guinea Conakry, the fight against noncommunicable diseases in Solomon Islands, Covid-19 response in Mongolia, mobile mental health units in war-torn regions of Ukraine, the distribution of the Covax vaccine to indigenous populations in the Colombian Amazonas, the transformation of polio teams into Covid-19 rapid response teams in Pakistan, the elimination of cervical cancer in Nigeria, the large-scale Covid-19 vaccination efforts in rural provinces in Afghanistan and Nepal, Spain’s efforts to keep sports safe during the pandemic, HIV self-testing in Bulgaria, and many more. This project was an enormous task but equally gratifying - we feel like we contributed to documenting history and keeping the world informed in an unbelievable year.