Most Shocking Second a Day
Save the Children UK2014
Most Shocking Second a Day is a 2014 online film for Save the Children UK, created by Don't Panic, London.
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The line
Just because it isn't happening here doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Why it works
A 90-second film assembled from one-second clips, borrowing the “second a day” video-diary format then popular online. It follows a British girl through a year that begins with a birthday party: news of unrest murmurs in the background, then come air strikes, flight and fear, and her next birthday is marked with a single candle amid the wreckage. Created by Don’t Panic for Save the Children UK and directed by Martin Stirling of UNIT9, it was released in March 2014, three years into Syria’s war, and ends on the line “Just because it isn’t happening here doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” It is studied for bringing a distant crisis home by relocating it to London and to a child who could be the viewer’s own, inside a format audiences already loved. UNIT9 reported 21 million YouTube views in five days; it became the first non-profit ad to top YouTube’s monthly ads leaderboard, and won a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes in 2014.
Techniques
- Pathos Following a British girl from one birthday to the next, through air strikes and flight, makes a distant war feel close to the viewer's own family.
- Purpose and cause A children's charity relocates the crisis of Syria's war to London to make audiences care about children caught up in it.
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