The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
Tommy's shows a child who is only a reflection to make baby loss visible
Special London's film for Tommy's reveals a child in the park exists only as a reflection — the image of absence after baby loss, ending on a rainbow kite.
Tommy's
What it had to solve
Tommy's, the UK pregnancy and baby charity, wanted to raise awareness of its research into miscarriage and baby loss. Conversations with bereaved adults showed the loss is not one moment but a lifetime of absence — a feeling hard to put into words.
How it works
Tommy's is a UK charity working on research to tackle miscarriage and baby loss. Its campaign 'Projecting Life' began from conversations with bereaved adults across the country, which made one point repeatedly: pregnancy loss does not end at the moment it happens but stays with people throughout their lives.
Special London turned that insight into a visual device. The film shows a child skipping through a park, and reveals through puddles that the child exists only as a reflection — present in the scene, impossible to reach. The image stands for the profound absence a family lives with after losing a baby.
The film does not leave its audience in that absence. It ends with children, real and reflected, looking up at a rainbow kite — healing and possibility after loss — so the awareness message lands with hope rather than only grief. The campaign's purpose is to make Tommy's research visible to the public.
Why it lands
- Bereaved adults described the loss as lifelong, so the film's structure mirrors their real experience instead of the usual single-moment story.
- A child who is only a reflection lets the audience discover the loss in the same instant a parent would feel it.
- The image needs no explanation: absence is shown, not told, so the film works for anyone, whether or not they have lived it.
- The rainbow-kite ending gives the research message somewhere to go, so raising awareness does not stop at grief.
What it did
The film gave an invisible, lifelong grief a single legible image — a child who is there and not there — and carried Tommy's research message into the D&AD awards archive.
What you can take
When a subject resists language, show the shape of its absence: a child who is only a reflection lets viewers discover the loss themselves, and hope can enter the same frame without flattening it.
Since then
The D&AD archive page preserves the film and credits Special London as entrant, advertising agency and design agency, with Tommy's as brand and client. For a subject that usually resists direct imagery, the reflection device became the campaign's durable image of absence — an example of making grief visible without words.
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