Tom
Savonick
Senior
Medical Writer
Our client faced a challenge. They were a
medical device manufacturer with a sensational new product, a coronary stent
similar to this:
Coronary stents are small wire-mesh tubes that
open up narrow or weak arteries. From the picture above, you can imagine our
client’s challenge. Stents are small, they aren’t much to look at, and all
stents look pretty much the same. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a stent is a
stent is a stent.
But our client’s stent offered distinct
competitive advantages over conventional stents. Using their stent, a cardiac
surgeon could greatly reduce the number of steps required to install the stent,
use fewer highly specialized tools, and reduce the duration of the surgical
procedure by about 10 minutes. Shorter surgeries usually translate into shorter
recovery times for most patients.
The significance of these benefits isn’t
apparent from reading a bullet list in a PowerPoint presentation or even by
looking at drawings that show how the stent works. To fully appreciate the
stent’s advantages, you would have to look inside a coronary artery during a
surgical procedure. Because the intended audience was cardiac surgeons, any
presentation would require absolute anatomical accuracy. A scientifically
correct animation seemed the best solution.
“Animation is the most effective solution for
explaining how things work,” says Marc Sirockman, Executive Vice President and
General Manager at Artcraft Health Education. “Animation can quickly orient
viewers, transport them down to the cellular level inside the body, and demonstrate
competitive advantages in a way that they can easily understand. Our
illustrators, animators, and designers have incredible talent for producing
anatomically accurate images that enable viewers to quickly grasp complex
ideas.”
Our involvement in the stent project began
with a face-to-face meeting between the client and Brian Schaechter, our director
of business development. Brian listened intently as the client described their
stent, its competitive advantages, the competitive landscape, and their
marketing objectives.
After the meeting, Brian downloaded
everything he had learned from the client to the Artcraft team that would
remain with the project until its completion. In our lingo, this type of
meeting is called the “internal kickoff.” Participants in an internal kickoff
usually include our creative director and a sales rep, medical illustrator,
animator, designer, and medical writer.
“The
internal kickoff is a critical step because it’s where we come together as an
official team for the project” says Mike Boasso, Director of Medical
Illustration. “We assign roles and get a full explanation of the project from
the sales rep. Then we devise a list of key questions to ask the client. At
this point in a project, there are factors that are crucial to our
understanding. We need to know who the intended audience is, what format the
animation should be delivered in, and what will be the maximum resolution that
the animation will be viewed in.”
Answers
to those crucial questions are delivered by the client in what we call an
“external kickoff.” Here, the client team meets the Artcraft team in a
face-to-face meeting, if possible, or if not, in a conference call. In the
external kickoff, the Artcraft team describes the animation process to the
client and discusses the project timeline and deliverables.
“The external kick-off is
where I like to infuse a lot of enthusiasm into the project right off the bat,
says Doug Walp, Medical Animator. “It's our first chance to discuss the project
critically with the client. I want to be clear on every detail of the project
and get answers about the animation’s aspect ratio, audience, and what the
client is expecting as a final deliverable. I also want to educate the client
about our process and why it has to be done a certain way. I want the client to
leave the external kickoff as enthusiastic about the animation project as I
am.”
After the external
kickoff and with enthusiasm riding high, the team’s medical writer creates a
story outline: all prose, no pictures, describing the animation’s progress from
title screen to closing logo. A snippet of story outline for the stent
animation might look something like this:
TITLE SCREEN (FADE OUT)
Stent enters introducer shaft (SHOWN FROM DISTAL TIP TO PROXIMAL HUB)
Introducer shaft enters catheter
Heart is beating as guiding catheter is engaged in left main coronary artery
The outline may not
sound as compelling as The Godfather,
but after the Artcraft Health Education animators work their magic, the
finished animation could end up as the Citizen
Kane of cardiac stent animations.
After receiving client approval on the story
outline, the animation team begins to draw, adding a rough sketch to each scene
in the story outline. One or 2 full-color images will be included to enable
clients to sense the look and feel of the finished product. This step is the
point at which you begin to appreciate the extreme talent of medical
illustrators. They are professional artists, able to render any part of the
human body in eye-pleasing detail. They are also healthcare professionals with
advanced degrees in the life sciences. Every Artcraft Health Education medical
illustrator and animator took courses such as anatomy,
pathology, microanatomy, physiology, embryology, and neuroanatomy.
The completed sketch storyboard goes back to
the client for review. After any changes are made and the client okays the
sketch storyboard, our medical illustrators crank up their artistry to the next
level and produce full-color, anatomically accurate renderings of each sketch.
These drawings will be used in the finished animation, so they are created with
utmost precision. Action notes, similar to the prose of the story outline, are
included on every board. These notes provide details about movements, changes
in lighting, special effects, and other directions.
“The full storyboard is a turning point in
the animation process,” says Brandon Keehner, Medical Illustrator/Animator.
“Any changes that clients request are best made early in the process. Changes to
the story outline are a matter of simply editing a Word file. Changes to a
sketch take more time, and changes to the color images in the full storyboard
are even more time consuming. But once the client approves the full storyboard
and we begin animating, changes can have a serious impact on timelines and
budgets.”
Before the Artcraft team can begin the
animation, the audio track must be selected and recorded so that it can be
synchronized with the animation during production. The voice talent who will
record the voiceover is chosen by the client after we offer some suggestions and
send sample voice recordings. The ideal voice talent will impress the intended
audience with sincerity while accurately conveying the animation’s message.
Next, appropriate music samples are suggested
by our team, approved by the client, and matched to the timing of the
animation’s movements. If you’re unsure about the importance of music to a
video, try to imagine 2001: A Space
Odyssey without the playful Johan Strauss waltzes or the dynamic opening
notes of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake
Zarathustra. Music matters.
With all the preliminary steps completed, the
final animation begins. It’s an involved process that can take 20 business days
or more, depending on the complexity of the finished product. Animations are
constructed from a series of flat images that are displayed in rapid sequence
to simulate motion. An average animation will contain about 25,000 images, each
of which requires about 10 minutes of computer time to produce and will be
synchronized to a snippet of music, voiceover, and special effects. A change to
any one of those images usually requires a costly, time-consuming rerendering of
the entire sequence. If there are no further changes, the project is now
complete.
The animation process described here may
sound lengthy. Actually, we left out a few steps along the way. There are some
additional meetings and several medical/legal reviews involved in the process. Before
each medical/legal review, Artcraft Health Education applies a thorough process
of fact checking and quality assurance to ensure that every claim made in the
animation is supported by scientific facts in the medical literature. Despite
its time and expense, animation has an effect that no other medium can
approach.
“Watching the finished product for the first
time is magical,” says Jamie Rippke, Medical Illustrator/Animator. “With little
more than a minute of animation, we help our client market their stent, cardiac
surgeons improve their technique, and patients recover more quickly. No other
medium enables us to accomplish so much in so short a time.”
