The Count

For patients at SickKids, making it from one birthday to the next isn’t a given. It’s a fight. Day by day, week by week, month by month, patients, families, and the hospital fight forward. Their fight is not dissimilar to that of a professional athlete. The game, match, or bout, is just a marker. The real fight is what happens every day before that.
 
So, we joined two highly distinct visual and emotional worlds: athletic training and children’s birthdays. Featuring 23 real SickKids patients in a series of athletic training scenes blended with birthday imagery, we depicted patients literally training and fighting for their next birthday. These surrealist sequences and real-life moments are interwoven to create a tapestry that communicates the emotional truth of an experience that cannot be put into words.