Old-timey music plays in the background as a dress-clad housewife greets her clean-cut husband in a 1950s-style kitchen.
As they sit down for dinner, the husband falls into a coughing fit, and a narrator pops up in the background: “What Johnny doesn’t know is that he’s contracted polio. It only takes one person infected with the polio virus to bring disease into your home.”
The film – created by students at Spy Hop’s Kahlert Youth Media Arts Center – serves as an allegory for vaccinations in the time of COVID-19 while also reminding the public of diseases that have been nearly eradicated through immunizations over the decades.
“Vaccines were safe back then; they are safer now,” the video concludes. “Vaccines are the world’s biggest asset against disease.”
Over $74,000 in funding from the CDC Foundation – a private, nonprofit organization that partners with the private sector to promote public health – funded Spy Hop students’ production of the film, posters and an interactive video game.
To share the students’ work locally, Spy Hop partnered with the Salt Lake County Health Department, which plans to share the film, poster and game via social media, community partners and at local outreach events.
“In public health communications, we see art as a tool that helps us turn information and hard data into narratives and images,” said Gabriel Moreno, a spokesperson for the health department. “This is significant because we can leverage arts and digital media to create a common language … to reach and engage our audiences.”
With $2.5 million in national funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC Foundation provided grants to 30 arts organizations throughout the country to build COVID-19 and influenza vaccine confidence in their local communities.
“This tool is especially important to us in public health communications when trying to increase COVID vaccine confidence and uptake,” Moreno said.
Students completed the projects as part of Spy Hop’s “Vax to the Max” project with the help of professional mentors. Students worked in different areas – film, music, audio, graphic and game design – and were able to gain experience within their respective media spaces.
Students in charge of the PSA video, for example, filmed on location in the basement of a hotel in Sandy. They had one day to shoot, which created a situation that required the need to work efficiently.
“It was a really tight space,” said audio student Soraya Wainwright, who recorded sound during filming. “Having 20 people in one tiny room was super, super busy. It was crazy but really fun.”
The film students said the decision to center on the 1950s and polio came during changes to the video’s script. The concept originally only acted as a brief flashback, but they decided to expand it to draw parallels with a virus that primarily afflicted older generations.
“We had to figure things out on the fly,” said student Ceci Davis, who worked on the film as a casting producer.
Students from Spy Hop’s audio and music program also lended their work to the video with the score, culminating in a collaborative project.
“We listened to ‘50s music and then … came up with different melodies and beats,” Wainwright said about the creation of the score. “We recorded the guitar, drums and piano all in-studio.”
Design students illustrated the graphic poster, with William Wainwright coding a desktop video game from the ground up using the Unity game engine. The game, published on the game-hosting site itch.io, allows players to act as a vaccine antibody and neutralize pathogens in their way.
As of July 7, 62% of Utahns were fully vaccinated and 29% had received a booster, according to the Utah Department of Health and Human Services.
“I hope [our work] can provide people with more education,” film student Abigail Tello said.
Spy Hop (208 W. Harvey Milk Blvd.) will showcase the film, poster and video game Saturday, July 16, at its monthly block party from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Spy Hop will also provide food and beverages, as well as free vaccinations and testing.
