CONTIGO

Some health stories are too important to be told only with data. Herpes zoster affects approximately one in three people over the course of their lifetime, causing intense burning pain, groups of blisters and, in some cases, a nerve pain that can last for months or even years after the outbreak. What makes it particularly difficult to communicate is its nature: the virus stays dormant in the body after a chickenpox infection, sometimes for decades, before reactivating. It waits. It hides. And most people have no idea it is still there.

The challenge for this campaign, created with VML, was finding a way to make that invisible reality visible and human. The answer was a short animated film called Contigo, built entirely without dialogue, where the story is told through the life of a character and the quiet, persistent presence of something they carry without knowing it.

Contigo opens in the warmth of childhood, following a character through the ordinary moments of a life, such as laughter, comfort, the safety of familiar spaces. The virus is present from the beginning, woven into the story long before the character has any reason to notice it. As the film moves forward and the character grows older, that dormant presence slowly resurfaces, and the emotional weight of the story shifts in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable.

The visual approach was built to hold that emotional arc. The animation draws from the feeling of memory itself, with a style that carries the texture of something handmade and the warmth of moments worth keeping. In its quieter scenes, it echoes the kind of emotional detail that recalls Jessie's flashback in Toy Story 2, where a single perspective holds an entire life's worth of meaning. In its broader passages, it moves closer to the language of Here, the film directed by Robert Zemeckis, using a fixed frame to let time pass visibly while the emotional center of the story stays still.

At Lightfarm, the production was built across 2D and 3D animation pipelines, combining Maya, Toon Boom and After Effects to create a visual language that felt consistent, tactile and alive throughout. The goal was to make the audience feel the weight of something that goes unseen for too long, and to carry that feeling all the way to the film's final call to action: talk to a healthcare professional and get ahead of herpes zoster before it gets ahead of you.

Contigo was developed for screening at medical conferences and festivals, where the conversation around prevention needs to reach people who already understand the clinical picture but still need a story to make it land.