2026 Canadian Census.
Connecting us all.
PROBLEM: The objective was to produce a national animation campaign that would increase participation in Canada’s census program by addressing a core behavioral barrier: public hesitation rooted in distrust, confusion, and low perceived relevance. The communication challenge required reframing the census as accessible, inclusive, and straightforward, while clearly demonstrating multiple participation methods—online, phone, and mail—within 25 seconds.
The project also required an accurate representation of Canada’s demographic diversity, increasing the complexity of character design, casting, and scene composition. The environmental diversity of the world's second-largest country had to be shown with requests for landmarks and visual Easter eggs included throughout.
SOLUTION: Crafting a world reflecting Canada with characters as diverse as the country, in environments that span the great north to Canada's urban cities. We've created small vignettes that are connected with the census black dot that you add to your form. Each vignette had to be adaptable and flexible to reflect the storyboard changes and still allow the continuous camera to move through seamlessly throughout the spot. Characters, environments, and props were built as flexible components that could be reused and recombined across scenes. This allowed the team to handle increased scope without proportionally increasing production time.
Animation allowed our team to expand from a limited cast to a broad cross-section of Canadians without logistical constraints. The ability to design and control diverse characters ensured inclusive representation across regions, cultures, and lifestyles, was critical to reinforcing the message that the Canadian census applies to everyone.
