Pharma > Disease Awareness & Understanding
21GRAMS, New York / GENENTECH / 2019
Overview
Credits
Describe any restrictions or regulations regarding Healthcare/RX/Pharma communications in your country/region including:
This was created for a pharmaceutical company in the US. It went through a rigorous review process with the internal medical/regulatory/legal team to meet all FDA standards.
Describe the target audience and why your work is relevant to them.
Our audience is the hemophilia A community. Hemophilia primarily affects boys and young men. While medicine treats the physical issues, social/emotional challenges limit their lives.
The opening animation for Challenge Accepted (with our original theme song) not only leads into the show. It reminds our audience that anything's possible.
Write a short summary of what happens in the film
This piece is the opening animation for Challenge Accepted, a reality/comedy series created to break the ice on serious, unspoken social/emotional issues in the hemophilia community. It is also a standalone piece.
We open on a red blood cell, symbolic of hemophilia. It unzips, opens up, and reveals a whole world waiting. An animated version of host Justin Willman (from Netflix’s Magic for Humans) seamlessly transitions from scene to scene, engaging in different activities - from shooting a t-shirt cannon to holding a dirty diaper. Every scene reflects a key moment or character from each Challenge Accepted episode.
At the end, Justin uses the logo as a ladder, symbolic of overcoming odds. At this point, each episode gets its own custom animation that reflects the storyline (there are six variations, in all). For this entry, we submitted the opening animation for Challenge Accepted's "Branch Out" episode, where they go camping.
Cultural/Context information for the jury
N/A
Tell the jury about visual effects / type(s) of animation used and summarise any relevant challenges or techniques.
The animation is meant to be fun and unconventional. In a world of CGI and art styles that are so slick they lose their humanity - we felt this piece needed the human touch of hand-drawn, 2D animation. To ensure the animation felt unusual and new, the characters and scenes take the form of a unique, abstract illustration style that makes it very memorable.
Relevant challenges: The budget was only 10K for this animation (which included six variations [alternate endings] to be bespoke to each of the Challenge Accepted episodes). The schedule was about one month, from concept to fully produced pieces.