Walgreens Campaign Helps Ugandan Children Share Stories of Beauty and Hardship

Walgreens has partnered with Vitamin Angels to help distribute vitamins to children all over the globe by donating a portion of their vitamin sales to the organisation, which distributes vitamins to pregnant women and children up to the age of five around the world. To help illustrate how children in developing countries can go blind due to Vitamin A deficiencies, GSD&M partnered with RYOT Films, Foundation Editorial, and Nice Shoes to produce a social media campaign entitled 'See What They See.'

The series focuses on Ugandan children that would be at risk for developing blindness, and in addition to footage captured by RYOT, features footage captured by the children themselves, so that the rest of the world would be exposed to what they see. Austin based editor Jason Uson of Foundation Editorial cut a two-minute anthem piece that introduced the campaign, as well as five additional two-minute spots, three 30 second spots and roughly fifty social videos that shared the perspective of each child who had been given a camera.

“This was such an amazing project on so many levels. The scale of this job was gigantic! Austin Peck from RYOT Films continuously shot with 3-4 cameras over an 8 day period, and I spent over 2 weeks just sorting through the footage,” said Uson.

“I needed to find those moments that would create the layers of affect and emotion we needed to get the message across within the hours and hours of content. Uganda is a beautiful country with beautiful families, oftentimes finding laughter and playfulness in their everyday lives. We wanted to capture the natural beauty of the country but also show that these people are in real need, everyday. Balancing it all was incredibly important.”

"The talented and sleep deprived crew over at Foundation sorted through many miles of footage to help piece together a campaign that we’re all really proud to have been a part of,” said GSD&M ACD/AD Greg Wyatt.

Thanks to Foundation Editorial’s remote partnership with Nice Shoes, Uson and the creatives from GSD&M in Austin were able to collaborate in real-time with colourist Gene Curley, who was grading the footage in New York. 

Curley described his process on developing two distinct looks with the team: “Jason and I started working on it and developed a really beautiful, polished look for the main footage that introduced the concept. The GSD&M team really loved that. We then went through a couple of explorations to create the look for the footage captured by the children. We tried it raw, and with a cool look that contrasted the warmth of the rest of professional footage, but we found that a flatter, more natural look served this campaign and helped to tell this story.”

"It’s great to be able to work in Austin remotely with the creative talent at Nice Shoes,” added GSD&M producer Dylan Heimbrock. “Gene did an amazing job bringing out the natural beauty of Uganda, and the experience was no different than if he had physically been here in the studio with us.”