This film was created as part of a package for the Medical Research Council (UKRI) – offering a brand film and then an accompanying commercial film that looks at the actual work they do in more practical terms.

Working with an award-winning Creative Director and Director of Photography, we turned the staff of MRC into actors, and their laboratories in to sets as we delivered on a creative that reflects the open-minded, human-centric thinking required to solve some of the biggest problems in life. What causes cancer cells to mutate? What can flies teach us about our own DNA? How can we extend life?

The challenge was how to turn some of the world’s most advanced, future-looking research in to something palatable for the public, connecting quite abstract developmental research in to something that will benefit society.

We focussed on the creative process behind dreaming the impossible, asking the right questions to elicit unimaginable answers.

As part of a package for the Medical Research Council (UKRI) this film looks at the actionable outcomes of the groundbreaking research they do. It’s not just theories but practical applications that are already deriving commercial returns.

Cloud9Media created this film along side a hero brand anthem, piggybacking off a larger high-end shoot to make not only this single film, but three standalone stories.

Merck Mectizan Donation Program Film

Client Brief
Merck asked us to create a film celebrating 5 billion Mectizan treatments donated for river blindness and elephantiasis. They wanted a piece to share with staff and show at their main factory in Haarlem. Therefore, the goal was to highlight the program’s scale, impact, and Merck’s long-term commitment.

Our Approach
First, we combined staff interviews from last year’s annual event with archival footage from years of filming the Mectizan Donation Program across multiple countries. This approach allowed us to show both the human and operational impact of the program.

Next, our MD, Steve Maud, composed a soundtrack called The Promise, inspired by Merck’s motto: “As much as needed, for as long as needed.” The music guided the narrative and emphasized the dedication behind the program. Additionally, by blending heartfelt interviews, historical footage, and cinematic visuals, we illustrated the difference 35 years of commitment has made to communities around the world.

Impact and Results
As a result, the film premiered at Merck’s annual event and received enthusiastic applause. It reinforced the Mectizan Donation Program as a cornerstone of Merck’s work and strengthened staff pride. Furthermore, the film helped secure additional funding for the program and increased awareness of the company’s global impact.

Overall, by telling the story of Merck’s long-term commitment, the film demonstrates how strategic content can educate, inspire, and celebrate at the same time. The Merck Mectizan Donation Program film commemorated a historic milestone and created a shared sense of purpose among staff. In this way, it made the scale and importance of the initiative tangible and meaningful for everyone who watched it.

A locally shot film, told by locals, for the wider world and putting the focus on how developments in technology now put diagnosis at your fingertips.  

Innovation is fundamental to achieving elimination of Neglected Tropical Diseases and FIND wanted the drivers of this important project to tell their own story. 

With travel restrictions in place we went to our trusted and incredibly hardworking contact, cameraman George Muiruri, who followed a day in the life with the team running this prototype test for schistosomiasis in Kwale, Kenya.

This is a good illustration of how we apply our approach of working with local film crew to make the most of their expertise and knowledge, whilst reducing the environmental footprint that film production has historically been associated with.

The third of our 6 case studies for Blood Cancer UK, in which we meet Louise who is in remission from Hodgkin lymphoma. Louise underwent 20 months of treatment including a bone marrow transplant and chemo – but had her diagnosis not been delayed, she may have received the appropriate treatment sooner. This is why Louise advocates for prompt diagnosis.

Through the poignant and intimate stories of the people we met, our films reveal how the lack of awareness about blood cancer* has a devastating impact on those it affects and their loved ones, and how they advocate for urgent action.

The films form the core content of a campaign to increase awareness of blood cancer signs and symptoms and its impact, to help improve early diagnosis, encourage policymakers to prioritise the disease, and help everyone with blood cancer feel connected and heard.

The series is being shown on Blood Cancer UK’s social media channels over the period of World Blood Cancer Day, which happens every year on May 28th.

*Little-known fact: 31% of people with blood cancer have to visit to their GP three or more times before being diagnosed. Louise’s delayed diagnosis led to complications with her treatment, and she’s not the only one.

To create video and photographic coverage for TV presenter Charlie Webster’s trip for the Malaria Must Die campaign, our Cloud9Media team spent a busy action-packed week in Western Uganda. In the process, Charlie saw with her own eyes how malaria impacts local communities, and came to terms with a fatal disease that she caught herself when cycling to the Rio Olympics in 2016 on a charity fundraising drive.

At the forefront of the fight against malaria, organisations like Malaria No More have always taken a bold controversial approach to their messaging to help it resonate with Western audiences. The aim of their campaigns is to bring home the reality that malaria is not something that happens elsewhere, but is affecting people everywhere. Increasingly, thanks to climate change, this includes areas of the world where malaria was once unheard of.

Using archival shots taken from Charlie’s broadcast career and stills of her hospitalisation, our team combined these with our own footage to show the background of Charlie’s journey. The result is a short film that captured the challenges she and other sufferers of malaria face, and how there is hope for the elimination of malaria.

In a heartwarming 2-minute film, we journey through time from the 1980s to the present to discover the incredible story of Mectizan.

It’s an inspiring story about a simple pill that’s had a life-changing impact for millions of people across the world. And it starts with Professor Gil Burnham‘s dedication to testing Ivermectin as a treatment for Onchocerciasis, which became a remarkable journey that led to the treatment of two neglected tropical diseases: Oncho and Lymphatic Filariasis.

The film captures the transformative power of Mectizan through its success story. We learn about the program’s transition from a disease control program into an elimination program, as over 12 billion Mectizan pills are distributed across the world. From the factory to the hands of those who need it this tiny pill goes through a very long journey to have a huge impact in countries’ health systems.

Most touching of all, we witness the momentous achievement of eliminating Onchocerciasis and Lymphatic Filariasis in eight different countries, freeing people from the shackles of these diseases. But the impact doesn’t stop there: Mectizan’s success has led to the inclusion of a new sector in public health, NTDs (Neglected Tropical Diseases), in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3.

Capturing discussion and curating conversations can be very impactful when communicating the impact of science on people.

In this session, leading NCD experts Bente Mikkelsen (WHO), Sergio Carmona (FIND), James Hazel (Access to Medicine Foundation), Sanjay Sarin (VP, FIND), Dr Fifa A Rahman (Matahari Global Solutions), Lejla Druskic (T1D Advocate), Kara Hanson (LSHTM) and Bill Rodriguez (CEO, FIND) came together to discuss the role diagnostics play in the fight against NCDs, including how the latest innovations and financing can enable even greater success on the global scale.

To create these coffee chat discussions, we hosted live chats using Riverside as a platform to capture high-quality video footage, that we the packaged in to a series of insightful discussions between the world’s experts on diabetes and other Non-Communicable Diseases.

One in seven of the world’s population suffer from a neglected tropical disease. That’s more than the population of Europe. And yet, through large-scale mass drug distribution programmes in some of the poorest regions on the planet, nearly one billion people are now safer from these diseases than they were half a decade ago.

This film celebrates the 5th anniversary of a groundbreaking international coalition: Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Its aim is hugely ambitious yet highly focused: to control, eradicate or eliminate ten debilitating and potentially fatal tropical diseases by 2020. Here, we document some of the incredible progress so far.

This six-minute introductory film was shown to over 800 senior government officials and world health delegates at the World Health Organisation in Geneva in April 2017. With a revised version created for distribution on social media after the event, this brings the number of films we delivered to 15 – all of which help to share the positive impacts of this life-changing programme to a wider audience.

Humanity has eradicated one dangerous disease: smallpox. Under the right circumstances, we are on the path to achieve elimination or eradication of four others.

We were commissioned to create a series of films aimed at increasing awareness and accelerating progress towards disease elimination, particularly around neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) such as polio, lymphatic filariasis, river blindness & malaria.

By focusing on the key lessons from the successful smallpox and ongoing polio eradication campaigns, and hearing from the people at a global and national level, our films in GLIDE’s ‘Eliminating Diseases’ video series sought to  raise the profile of NTDs amongst stakeholders, funders and governmental organisations.

We’re proud to share that our film generated over 1,000 views on GLIDE’s YouTube channel, and over 150,000 combined video plays on their social media channels. In addition, page visits to the organisation’s website rose by 161%, along with a 187% increase in new users, with the most notable increase seen in visitors from target country, Cameroon, which saw a 100% rise.

As a crowning achievement, we along with Gong Communications were nominated as finalists in the 2023 Sabre Awards in the Central African category for work in raising awareness through GLIDE’s Webisodes Campaign.

Commissioned for the Mectizan Donation Program‘s annual event – held this year in Bogota – this film looks at the impact of PAHO (Pan American Health Organization), funded by the Carter Center. Whilst huge success has already been attributed to the donation program of Mectizan for River Blindness thanks to MSD/Merck, there are still 35,000 Yanomami Indians in the Amazon Jungle who are still at risk, where access is challenging to say the least.

With limited archive and mainly stills available, and without the opportunity for us to film footage ourselves (as we prefer to do!), for this film we decided to take a more contemporary, minimalist approach using sound design, a rhythmic soundtrack and playful text manipulation to let the words on screen deliver maximum impact.

We delivered the film for the event in Spanish, while providing Spanish and English versions for social media – delivered in portrait format to make sure it hit the top of peoples feeds on Instagram and LinkedIn.

”We were very happy with our video “5 Billion Mectizan Treatments – The Americas” produced by Cloud9Media. They handled the challenges of a complicated story, limited footage, and a multilingual audience to create a powerful piece in three languages. We debuted the video at an important meeting where it was very well received, generating positive energy and momentum.

We rely on the expertise of the Cloud9Media team to produce appealing and informative videos to reach our global audience.”

Virginia Murray, Communications Manager, MDP

When we got the call to make a film about normalising testing for COVID-19 around the world, we leapt to the challenge.

Storyboarding, working with three filming crews (including actors, locations, costume etc..) in India, Estonia and Kenya, the result is ‘Normalise: Behind The Scenes’, which we filmed using a series of sequences to highlight what lives could be like if we all knew our status at any given moment in the day.