It’s more than five years since the worst of COVID-19 or Coronavirus global pandemic and lockdowns, social distancing and masks are a distant memory for most.

And you might be forgiven for thinking that pandemics were a thing of the past.

However, it is a fact there are new and ongoing outbreaks happening all the time across the world. They are particularly prevalent in in low and middle-income countries and frequently include outbreaks of cholera, ebola, mPox, measles and polio.

But what has that to do with us?

In the beginning

We were contacted by Unicef oin 2021n behalf of GOARN (the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network - a network of global public health institutions and NGOs formed to tackle epidemics and outbreaks.

We were asked to help create a series of short videos to help explain the practice of Integrated Outbreak Analytics (IOA) to health workers operating in the field. IOA is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding outbreak dynamics and for informing outbreak response for workers in contact with outbreaks..

What did we do?

We started with a series of scripts supplied by Unicef, and in a series of videos call we went through each and made very rough sketches with ideas for characters and themes.

From theses early drafts and idea generation we drafted a developed storyboard for each video. This lead to edits to the script for time and clarity, and amendments to the sketches.

Moving forward

With approval for the developed storyboards, and the roughs, or draft drawings vector artwork was then created. Thes finished images were then were given life as whiteboard animation.

The client then recorded and supplied an audio recording of the script, and we edited the video and audio together, along with English subtitles.

All together in translation

We then created translated versions of all the videos in French, Spanish and Arabic, based on supplied scripts and audio. In all, twenty videos were completed.

To be honest, this process took a little longer than anticipated, as members of the team were themselves working in the field on outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere.

You can see all the videos, and read more about IOA on their website, or their YouTube channel.