ABOUT

People suffering from undiagnosed NTM lung disease aren’t being heard by their doctors. Their complaints about painful and disruptive symptoms are getting ignored, leaving them misdiagnosed for years. To finally get doctors’ attention, we paired real NTM patients with animators from around the world to create original films that communicate how hard it is for NTM patients to live without a diagnosis. “Unbreakable” tells the real-life story of Barbara, characterized as a CGI bunny. Barbara’s tale illustrates how she went from therapy to therapy, misdiagnosis to misdiagnosis, and doctor to doctor with no one having the right expertise to help. The film chronicles Barbara’s worsening condition and loss of hope, until she finally finds the answer she needs. This story is told through rich and poetic visuals that use fantastical layers to pave the way to tackling deeper concerns. Due to the bunny’s size and POV, everything needed to be painstakingly detailed and fully textured. With physicians ignoring their patients’ complaints for years, we knew that using a patient simply telling her story wasn’t going to make an impact. Instead, we employed the art of storytelling to deliver a breakthrough campaign that got doctors’ attention. The animations demand that doctors identify, diagnose, and treat NTM before their patients pay the price. We were able to deliver our message to our key physician segments—pulmonologists and infectious disease specialists—and urge them to recognize the symptoms of undiagnosed NTM so they could start testing and treating their at-risk patients for this odious disease.