If Your City Were Syria
What if your city was plunged into a conflict similar to that in Syria?
Save the Children released a time-lapse video last year, titled 'If London Were Syria', as part of their efforts to raise awareness about the plight of Syrian children and it is equally if not more powerful and harrowing a year later.
The video imagines the nightmare a British child would endure if war came to London and one can imagine that young girl living in any metropolitan city unaffected by civil war.
The video, created by a British creative agency Don't Panic, starts with a happy young girl blowing out candles on a birthday cake, playing dress-up, and asleep peacefully in a car. Slowly the images turn darker, and scene shows disruption, chaos, bombing, and panic as London gets gripped into a Syria-type conflict.
"Our solution was to tell a story that would bring the realities of Syria home, and to do it we combined the one-second-a-day and photo time-lapse formats to create a new way of showing an ordinary girl’s world falling apart in just a year," Don't Panic stated.
It closes with the words: "Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it isn't happening."
"We hope the video will resonate with members of the public, particularly those who don’t know much about the situation in Syria so they can really understand the plight of innocent Syrian children," said Jake Lundi, Director of Brand and Communications at Save The Children. "The message to the public is just because it’s not happening here, doesn’t mean it’s not happening."
The UN has called Syria’s four-year civil war the “world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe,” with an estimated 220,000 killed and more than 12 million in need of aid. About 5.6 million of those are children.
More than 3.8 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, according to the UNHCR, while another 7.6 million Syrians are displaced inside the country. At least 1.8 million Iraqis were also displaced last year by violence triggered by the Sunni militant onslaught.
You can support Save the Children’s ‘Syria Children in Crisis’ fund by donating online or by calling 1-800-728-3843.
