Workplace Adaptations

The Multiple Sclerosis International Federation (MSIF) is the global network of MS societies, connecting national MS organisations across more than 40 countries and territories worldwide. MSIF campaigns for better treatment, care and quality of life for the 2.9 million people living with MS around the world, working across healthcare systems, governments and employers to remove the barriers that people with MS face every day.

MSIF were looking for a series of campaign films that could reach employers across their global network as part of their digital output for World MS Day. The films need to show how some simple adaptations to the workplace would allow people with MS to continue working. The fundamental challenge was scale: the films needed to work across languages, cultures and contexts without requiring separate productions for each market.

Many of the barriers people with MS face at work are invisible to employers – fatigue, cognitive changes, difficulties with mobility or concentration that don’t show on the surface. The brief was to make those barriers visible, and to show how straightforward it can be to remove them.

The answer was animation, and a very specific use of it. Rather than a conventional animated explainer, we developed a device that combined illustration with filmed reality. Animated characters move through illustrated workplaces while a real, filmed human hand makes physical adaptations to the environment around them. The effect is immediate: it shows, in real time, how easy the changes can be. By removing voiceover entirely and designing the films to communicate through image and action alone, the series could travel without translation barriers.

We created five films, each focused on a different type of workplace adjustment, from changes to the physical environment to flexible working arrangements. Each film is self-contained, so employers can share individual films relevant to their own setting without needing to watch the full series.
The call to action at the end of each film was translated into 15 languages, the only language-dependent element in the whole series. Everything else works without words.

The Workplace Adaptations series gave MSIF a genuinely international campaign asset with five films that can be shared, distributed and used by MS societies and employers across more than 40 countries without any production rework. The decision to build the films around visual communication rather than language means they remain deployable across every market MSIF operates in, now and in future.

The project demonstrates a specific capability that relatively few production companies can offer: animation designed from the ground up for language-agnostic international distribution. That is a fundamentally different discipline from subtitling or dubbing. It requires that the creative concept works entirely without words, which shapes every decision from storyboard onwards.