How Vimeo and Case Jernigan Are Using their ‘Noggin’ to Market the MS Community
Across the expanse known as the tech industry, artificial intelligence is decidedly the technology du jour. AI-powered algorithms are particularly en vogue. Their effects are most felt on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X; the humans running these companies seemingly staunchly believe the robots are more intelligent (and efficient) at presenting users with information they’ll find interesting or relevant. Human curation still is very much a thing, though. As one example, Apple has fleets of humans who daily edit the App Store, Apple Music, Apple News, and other services.
Count New York City-based Vimeo as another fan of flesh-and-blood curators.
Last month, Vimeo marked National Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month by awarding a Staff Pick to 5-time Staff Pick honoree Case Jernigan for his latest animated short film called Noggin. The 7-minute movie, critically acclaimed at festivals such as Slamdance 2025, chronicles Jernigan’s journey as he goes through life while managing multiple sclerosis. For Vimeo’s purposes, the raison d’être for its Staff Picks initiative is to shine the proverbial spotlight on work from indie artists exactly like Jernigan—to wit, people who hail from marginalized and underrepresented communities whose work is oftentimes overlooked by algorithms designed to cater towards mainstream audiences.
According to Meghan Oretsky, who serves as lead curator running Vimeo’s Staff Picks program, the program has been around since 2008. For 17 years, she told me during a recent interview, Staff Picks has stood as “a collection of the best short films in the world” created by emerging, as well as established, independent filmmakers. Oretsky’s team sorts its picks into 10 categories, with her telling me “when we’re slotting films into the channel, we’re looking to fill each of those buckets.” Oretsky has been at Vimeo for 11 years, almost as long as the Staff Picks program has been in existence. She said 9 of those years have been spent in the trenches with the company’s curation team.
“I’ve been here for quite a while, so I know quite a bit about our platform,” Oretsky said.
When asked about Vimeo’s machinations for selecting its Staff Picks, Oretsky described it as a “really democratic process.” The curation team, she said, is “tiny” and uses a majority vote to determine which films receives endorsement by way of badging. Specific to Jernigan, Oretsky explained his first Staff Pick came in 2016, with Noggin depicting disability as something not “often heard in film.” To this day, Jernigan’s voice is one Oretsky and her charges want to elevate and one they still “absolutely love.”
Oretsky went on to say Vimeo institutionally “feels a responsibility” to amplify people whose stories “highlight the wide spectrum of human experience around the world.” She added it’s imperative to Vimeo that the company “surface stories you don’t hear enough of, but are true to a specific human experience.” There are odes to the LGBTQ people, Black people, and many more. Disabled people are amongst those highlighted.
“We [at Vimeo] think it’s really important to have special places for [these stories] on the platform,” Oretsky said.
Oretsky was effusive in her praise for Jernigan and for his work on Noggin.
“[Noggin is] like collage meets spoken poetry meets musical musings—it has [Jernigan’s] fingerprints all over it, which makes it really unique,” she said. “He uses literally his own voice to share his world in such a playful and warm and, in the end, an incredibly vulnerable stream of consciousness way. I really love that he uses hand-cut shapes with it… he literally has his fingerprints on it. You can see he’s created that himself with scissors. He creates this dreamy world somewhere between like, our collective reality as humans and his own personal vision as a person who lives with multiple sclerosis, I watched Noggin again, and there was one quote that I felt like summed up his voice. He says, ‘Your spine is spaghetti and your brain is a meatball and you’re on a bicycle on the top of a hill and you’re 4-years-old and you’re about to barrel down at light speed until you crash into the neighbor’s fence.’ It’s so relatable, but it’s also such a creative way of expressing what it’s like to be in his brain. Whenever an artist expresses themselves in their own way, [the audience is] always walking through the grooves of their brain. But when you’re watching Case’s films, it feels like you’re being led through a playground or a safari, and there are these Easter eggs you find every time you watch it. His films are never a one-time watch. They’re such a joy to experience, even when he’s sharing tough times suffering with his relapses with MS.”
In Jernigan’s own words, he described himself to me as a “storyteller at my core” with filmmaking representing the “culmination of my interests” around drawing, writing, and making music. He explained Noggin as coming to be after he received his MS diagnosis and started showing symptoms. He called the film a “coping mechanism,” something to move his hands and arms and “trying to just express myself without thinking too much.” It would be months later that Noggin began to assume a more concrete shape, but its essence, Jernigan reiterated, lies in its role as “[a] pure coping mechanism.”
“The film was made for myself… it was reassurance for myself,” he said.
When asked about what he wanted audiences to get out of Noggin, Jernigan told me his primary aim was “trying to get at that balance between sharing something very personal and very specific to me—the diagnosis and symptoms of a very rare disease—and telling something about that story.” He added through the artistry of the film—the music and movement, et al—he sought to share what he called a “universal poetry” which conveyed the universality of grief and struggle. “These [concepts] are things we have all experienced,” Jernigan said. “That was my goal: to land at that balance.”
Jernigan said Noggin’s aperture widened considerably from its original conceit over time, which he appreciates because its growth coincided with his own healing. His form of MS is most common and known as relapse-remitting. Medication helps, and the experiences varies from person to person, but the Cliff’s Notes version of Jernigan’s type of MS is there are periods of really bad flare-ups followed by periods of healing. As Jernigan’s healing began, his self-described “artistic instincts” began to activate and he could imagine how Noggin might play out and with whom he’d want to share it. Vimeo, he said, was the place he wanted the film to live such that “more people could see it if they were interested.” The company, he added, was “very kind” to award him yet another Staff Pick and thus promote it accordingly so it could broaden its reach.
Vimeo has been “great” to partner with, according to Jernigan. He called the platform the place where he “first fell in love” with independent animation. It was “always a goal” to someday earn a Staff Pick from Oretsky and crew after many films he admired and adored received the virtual thumbs-up from the curation team. All told, Jernigan expressed gratitude for the relationship he’s cultivated with Vimeo, saying the company has been “very good” to him over the years since first getting a Staff Pick.
For her part, Jernigan’s films are so resonant largely due to Oretsky’s personal belief that the medium “has a really powerful and unique ability to hold up a mirror [and show] what it’s like to be a human being and to feel validated and feel more alive as a human and feel like you’re not alone.” Indeed, Jernigan told me he’s heard from many fellow MS copers who express their deepest thanks to him for making Noggin and, to Oretsky’s point, making them see that they aren’t alone on their journeys. Vimeo, Oretsky said, provides a “lower barrier to entry” for people like Jernigan to “share what’s in his heart” with the wider world. The comments section of videos are a microcosm of the emotional aftermath of Jernigan’s films; Oretsky said Vimeo gets countless emails and other correspondence regarding the enduring impact of his work, as well as those like him.
“That’s a really special thing about our platform,” she said.
Jernigan detailed the profundity of the response to the fruits of his labor.
“One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is several people with MS have reached out and people have said something along the lines of ‘You put something in a physical form—an artistic and musical form—I had thought about for years but didn’t quite know how to express.’ One of those people said there were thoughts she’d been harboring for 30 years… she saw and felt them in the film,” he said of feedback he’s received from people about Noggin. “That kind of comment [and] that kind of message meant the world to me. It meant everything to me because, with the film, I was trying to get at showing what [dealing with multiple sclerosis] was like without being overly singular or too tight. I wanted to make something that was loose and open, but really did show what the anxiety of [having MS] is like and what the pain is like. Hearing from people who have been in my shoes… it was amazing and incredibly humbling to hear.”
Looking towards the future, Jernigan characterized himself as an “ambitious” person and said some of the realities of his MS has forced him to reevaluate what he can feasibly achieve. His plan is to “do everything in my power” to continue making movies as Lon as possible, as the art is “my way of communicating and my way of learning about myself and the world I live in and a way to collaborate with people that I care about.” Moreover, he’s no Nostradamus, so predicting his future is impossible. What is possible is Jernigan listening to his medical team and carrying with him a positive attitude. He conceded some days are better than others, but Jernigan currently relishes being in “a new space where humor and optimism are quite readily available to me,” adding he’s acutely aware of the cyclical nature of his condition and copes best he can.
As to Vimeo, Oretsky’s hopeful to keep doing what she’s doing with her charges on the curation team and especially to keep “elevating stories of people with disabilities.”
