On October 15th 2017, 15 million people tweeted the words ‘me too’ around the world in the space of 24 hours. 15 million survivors had their voices heard. A year later a lot had changed. The movement needed to redirect the conversation back to survivors and reinforce the power of empathy to heal.

Sexual abuse is challenging to talk about and even more difficult to visualize. Our solution was to bring a cross section of survivors’ stories to life through sound waves, representing the breaking of their silence. Raw audio was the natural starting point, which in turn informed the illustration style. To create real empathy, we captured the emotion through audio and visually focused on their strength and resilience. Through the message “We hear you. We see you. We believe you.,” the films aimed to rally survivors and supporters together in the fight to end sexual violence.

When Tarana Burke started the ‘me too.’ movement in 2006, she had no way of knowing that on October 15, 2017, 15 million Survivors would tweet, “#MeToo,” breaking the silence around sexual violence and igniting a global conversation. In the year since Tarana Burke’s grassroots initiative came into the spotlight, it became obvious that the movement’s mission was misrepresented: perpetrators were dominating a conversation that rightly belonged to Survivors.

Today, the power and support of the ‘me too.’ movement is met with a sometimes equally powerful backlash. This work was designed to refocus attention on not just the shared trauma of survivors, but their resilience and strength: their determination to keep fighting for narrative change; to believe in the ability of humanity to bend the moral arc of history.

We garnered more than 389M media impressions equating in $2.9M in ad value all through earned media.

We considered how sound waves could capture their stories in the most empathetic way. The animations had to be abstract - the more literal, the more traumatizing the work would be. Based on interviews, each animated film opened with a soundwave that represented a survivor’s voice and transformed into elements of their narration:

For Terry Crews, we illustrated the journey from bystander, to survivor and ally.

Emily Waters’ story describes a young woman blooming into her full power.

For Daniela, we visualized the sense of entrapment that comes with being an immigrant unable to speak the language.

Anonymous conveyed the strength of both the written and spoken word in breaking free of trauma.

Original music compositions heightened emotional cues unique to each experience.