Taome Bamford-White
Trachoma in Turkana
What is trachoma? Trachoma is the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness and is part of a group of conditions known as neglected tropical diseases (often referred to as NTDs). It can be likened to conjunctivitis but if left untreated it turns your eyelashes inwards, scraping at your eyes until you go blind. It is a disease that is thousands of years old and has been eliminated in most areas of the world. However, there are still 44 countries that count it as a public health problem and over 142 million people at risk of losing their sight.
Still not sure what Trachoma is? Most people aren't! That's why I created a video for a more in-depth explanation. Check it out below.
The main overarching film featured at the top of this page was made in Turkana in the depths of Kenya's northern desert land. We were there covering a success story, thanks to volunteer community workers like James and Ngurotin the area has gone from a high infection rate to so low that Sightsavers could stop mass outreach. We were witnessing some of the last remote surgeries and cases in the area.
Capturing B-roll ©Taome
I had a few roles on this trip. I shared leading the team (Videographer Tom Jenkinson, Photographer Tommy Trenchard, Country Office staff and Driver) each day with my colleague. Together we worked on gathering extra content for social media and collecting case studies.
Content collection involved interviewing patients and their families, the community workers and Sightsavers' surgical team.
I gathered video, Go Pro footage of surrounding areas and even 360 videos.
Discussions on 360 video. ©Taome
Learning a local dance (badly) ©Taome
Interviews with patients suffering from Trachoma. ©Taome
Postproduction we worked with Tom (Videographer and Editor) to pull together a storyboard. We did this by pulling all great quotes from transcripts and building out the story with the raw footage. We wanted to produce a film that represented the great work everyone was doing to save people sight, the narrative needed to come from them. I'm very keen to produce films like this with a person-first approach. It has to be from the voices of the people affected.
Once the film was put through the editing process it was handed to me to top and tail, adding in end frames and donor recognition. I then build out a social media distribution plan to gain the most engagement on this film as we could.
There were many successes (other than an above-average engagement rate on social media) from this trip. Using the content we got media hits, one being a story in The Guardian. The film was also nominated for an award from the World Health Organisation. It was then officially selected to represent the UK in the 'Video Reporting' category, making it top 15 in the world over thousands of entries.
As part of my social strategy to promote our nomination leading up the final results, I used quotes from WHO briefings by Director Dr Tedros. This lead to him retweeting not only my tweet about the blinding disease but also our brand to over 1 million followers.
Using footage from this trip I then solely created a four-part video series highlighting the stories I identified from the content we had collected. This entails; file pulling, quote pulling, storyboarding, raw cuts and video editing.
The first was a video on the location of Turkana. The fact that it is so remote along with how dry and dusty it is without great access to water for hygiene means Trachoma thrives there. The Turkanan are nomadic which means setting up treatment and stopping the spread of the blinding disease can be difficult.
The second is a feature on the brilliant 'Trachoma Trackers', the group of people volunteering in their communities to make sure no one goes blind needlessly. They screen the communities, walking miles and miles a day between villages in the scorching heat.
The third is showing everyone the skills our surgery team have. Some might call it the most remote surgery in the world. The drive miles to a meeting point where patients will meet them, set up a pop-up surgery and operate giving people the chance to save their sight a no longer feel pain.
The last features a family who have been struck by Trachoma. The grandmother, her sister and their daughters all have trachoma and have done for years. The grandmother, Akai told us she'd had it for over 50 years. Now totally blind she relies on her daughter's sight to help her move around, and with them having trachoma all their lives and sight were slowly slipping away. Thanks to the remote surgery Akai got to live pain-free and her daughter sight was saved.
The series of videos were released over a week in conjunction with a UK Aid Match appeal. A period of time that the UK government will match each donation brought in. These videos contributed toward this appeal which raised over £2 million pounds.
Give them a watch below.
