No Decision Without Us

Every year on World Down Syndrome Day, CoorDown releases a film that the global Down syndrome community rallies behind. For 21 March 2025, the brief was built on the disability rights principle that gives the campaign its name: nothing about us without us.

The film had to move through the rooms where decisions actually get made. A bedroom where a girl with Down syndrome is told what she will wear. A planning meeting about infrastructure, held without the wheelchair users who will use it. A school discussing emergency protocols without its deaf students. A public space designed without the blind people who navigate it. And it had to do all of it as a musical, with an original song and full choreography.

A musical needs continuous performance. Choreography does not survive being broken up into company moves, and a cast of performers with disabilities cannot be asked to spend a shoot day on location changes, load-ins and travel for the sake of set dressing.

The film needed many distinct environments, each one instantly readable as a specific kind of room where authority sits. Building them practically would have meant either a stage full of standing sets, which the budget could not carry, or a location schedule that would have spent the cast's energy on logistics rather than performance.

Synapse supplied the director, the cinematographer and the stage. Rich Lee, Synapse's Chief Creative Officer, directed. Christopher Probst, ASC, Synapse's Chief Innovation Officer, shot it. The film was captured on the Synapse volume at LA Center Studios.

Every environment was built in Unreal and played on the wall, so a location change became an environment swap rather than a company move. Fatima Robinson and Adrian Wiltshire's choreography could run continuously, and the cast performed inside a space they could see rather than against a green wall. Practical set dressing was targeted at the foreground, only where the camera needed it to sell the room.

The film launched on 21 March 2025 across CoorDown's channels and was amplified by NDSS, Down Syndrome Australia, the Canadian Down Syndrome Society, the Global Down Syndrome Foundation and eight further organisations.

Little Black Book, covering the launch, described the shoot as taking place at LA Center Studios with "Synapse, one of the best virtual production stages in the US", noting that the technology let the team shoot in as many locations as possible without ever moving from the facility. Muse by Clios later named it the top entry in its Favourite European Ads of 2025.