North York General is a community hospital that serves the people of North York and beyond. It’s recognized as one of Canada’s top 5 hospitals and among the top 100 hospitals in the world. NYG provides patients with a continuum of healthcare support throughout their lifetime, starting with its reputable birthing centre, to its pediatric care, emergency services, all the way to palliative and long term care. This year they were repositioning NYG to highlight the hospital’s efforts to provide exceptional care for patients from birth to end of life. We needed to create a platform/campaign to launch NYG’s new positioning to its donors, patients, and overall North York community, showing the critical role NYG plays in their patients' most life-defining moments.

To bring our “life happens in a blink” idea to life, the direction relied on seamlessly capturing this blinking technique from our hero character’s point of view as we cut from one life moment to the next. We had to clearly connote that this is one woman’s POV throughout her life, as well as the emotions she was experiencing, so we made deliberate choices to ensure we could feel her presence in every scene (like making people talk directly to her/camera). We also altered the picture so each scene captured how she actually felt in that moment- sometimes more blurry, slow, or muffled (like during the cancer sequence, where it feels like she’s underwater). Finally, we had to craft the blink technique so it was incredibly clear that each time we cut, it was her blinking to another major life moment.

Canadian hospitals largely rely on donated media to get their message across, and because of the impact and emotive power of “Blink”, NYGH was able to secure media placements valued at ten times their investment, spanning across cinema, TV, connected TV, and social. This helped us reach all Canadians on a national scale, even beyond the hospital’s catchment area.

The film was also shared and widely celebrated with the hospital’s prestigious top-tier donor base and board of directors, leading to all of them solidifying their financial commitments to the hospital.