Written by: Tziporah Thompson, CMI, MA
Say you’ve got an idea for a scientific animation to market your new product. You’ve booked the studio, given the creative brief, and done all the paperwork. Now you can just sit back and wait for the pretty pictures, right? While it may be tempting to tune out until you see some glamor shots, it could actually save you time and money to stay engaged through the initial steps of production (even if they’re not as exciting to look at). When looking at 3D medical or scientific animation services, the 3 major pre-production steps that are crucial to focus on before your team of medical animators can really get going are Script, Style, and Storyboard.
Script
If an animation were an athlete, the script would be her bones. Everything that comes later is built off of the script’s structure, making its careful construction extremely crucial. You don’t want the team to get 75% of the way through animating before realizing a piece of information is missing. It could disrupt the structure of the rest of the story, resulting in pushed deadlines and a lower quality product. Scripting is the time to think critically about questions such as: Who is the target audience? What is their baseline level of knowledge? What should be their key takeaways? By working closely with the medical animators throughout the scripting process, you can help develop a strong foundation for an excellent final product.
Style
Developing the initial style for a scientific animation is really where you can ensure your vision comes to life. The animation team will make recommendations and show you what is possible, but ultimately it’s your involvement that makes sure the look of the animation feels right to you.. Keep in mind that the final format and context of an animation are huge influences on how it should look. Think about: Where and how will it be viewed? How should people feel while watching it? Should it stand out on its own or match another product series? If you have examples of styles that you like or want your medical animation to be influenced by, share them because they can be great jumping off points that save time on back-and-forths.
Remember that changes that seem small at this stage can become exponentially more difficult to implement once the core production begins.
Storyboard
Storyboarding is where the visual storytelling gets planned out and thought through. Oftentimes, this gives you a whole new perspective on how well the script flows and the efficacy of your primary message. Try thinking through: Who is the “hero” of your story? Does each sequence flow easily into the next? Would someone with no prior knowledge be able to follow the message? Remember that changes that seem small at this stage can become exponentially more difficult to implement once the core production begins. While the medical animators will map out the narrative in the storyboard, they’ll need your feedback to make sure the plan is perfect before getting started on the animation.
At this point, the animation team will be off to the races. They’ll be doing what they do best, and you’ll have set them up for success by providing attentive support in those early stages.
While you’ll always have more opportunities for edits after seeing the actual animation, working closely with the animation team throughout Script, Style, and Storyboard will go a long way in ensuring that budgets are kept and deadlines are met.
To learn more about the core animation process, check out our unique Production Process, developed specifically for producing 3D medical animations. We hit all the key points of feedback together with no extra steps and no time wasted.
For Client: Generate: Biomedicines
Biotechnology is a field of vast growth, with new technologies emerging every day that are changing the way research is performed and medicine is practiced. Generate: Biomedicines and One Design Company partnered with Microverse Studios to produce a short animation that could communicate both the general idea and the specific applications of this technology, while capturing the spirit of discovery that it represents. Generate: Biomedicines had developed a machine learning platform that allows them to design molecules from scratch with whatever features they want. Our job was to examine their brand and create a visual language and structured story that could communicate the interface they’ve created between bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, and real biology while also creating a sense of awe and wonder.
A key moment in a new biotech company’s life cycle is when they are generating investment. Every audience interaction presents a limited amount of time to impress them enough to make them want to know more, and often the scientific story can be quite complicated. The resulting short film became a centerpiece for their communications efforts, driving a $370M Series B round.
For Client: Ventus Therapeutics
Ventus is on the vanguard of a sea change in drug discovery technology. Through a combination of computational analysis of protein structures (the molecules that drugs target) Ventus can predict the shape of potential binding pockets for drugs with unparalleled accuracy. However it doesn’t stop there—they use predictive software to figure out how water flows over the surface of these molecules, how individual water molecules respond, and then use that data to screen colossal numbers of known molecules to identify drug candidates. Results are confirmed in a wet lab and the data used to improve the model, finding potential therapeutic hits in a fraction of the time taken by conventional approaches.
To drive home how strange and new this approach is, materials evocative of meteorite and precious metals were combined with an environment designed to conjure an alien technology, while more conventional representations of computation and analysis were avoided.
By Olivia Slayden
A mechanism of action (MoA) animation, also called a method of action or mode of action video, is a short film that depicts how a drug operates on a molecular and cellular level to achieve its therapeutic results. These videos are among the most efficient ways to communicate foundational information about how a drug works, so that healthcare providers, patients, and investors can make informed decisions.
MoA Medical Animation: Who Will Watch it?
The typical audience for a pharma MoA is healthcare providers or investors. Because these short videos are such powerful learning tools, they are often leveraged for internal communications to educate sales staff and newer employees as well. Occasionally, simplified versions of these videos are used as patient education resources. While the script of the animation is always tailored to the audience, often videos targeting one audience can be modified to reach others.
Where MoA Animations Can Be Deployed
A high-end pharmaceutical MoA animation can form a visual centerpiece for a product's brand. There are several key ways to maximize its utility.
When recruiting for clinical trials, pharmaceutical animations can be extremely helpful in generating interest among healthcare providers to encourage their patients to enroll. There is so much new information constantly entering the medical community that it can be difficult to stay up to date on all of the clinical trial news. Often mechanism of action videos are deployed at medical conferences on enormous monitors to attract healthcare providers' interest on the expo floor. In this context, you have one chance to grab their attention, and so top-of-the-line imagery is critical to grab the viewer and maintain their confidence in the message.
At product launch, a high-end animation will maximize interest and optimize understanding and memory retention in target audiences, and contribute imagery and stylistic elements that can be used throughout all branded material.
As live presentation tools, MoA videos can provide a visual accompaniment to a discussion on the therapy's value proposition. When presenting live, the audience will be paying attention to what's on screen, to the presenter, and to the narration. In order to avoid overloading the audience or creating awkward silence while everyone watches the screen, typically the best results are achieved by creating an alternate edit that breaks the video into smaller parts to be narrated live by the presenter. This also helps the speaker to control the flow of the information and fit it more seamlessly into their presentation style.
As an online resource, mechanism of action videos can give web visitors a core foundation of understanding that will allow them to better engage with other information on the rest of the website. Because scientific imagery is accompanied by audio narration, the informational experience is much richer. Often, the video can tell visitors in two to three minutes what would have taken ten minutes to read in text.
MoA Animation Styles
3D Animation: Creating animation in a fully three dimensional style allows the animators to leverage all of the technological advances made in computer graphics over the last fifty years to create breathtakingly realistic and beautiful imagery. Precise and accurate depictions of molecules, cells, and tissues enable highly detailed discussions of the science. When properly executed, a fully 3D animation can provide the most accurate and visually appealing end result, and therefore this style tends to be the most popular approach in the pharmaceutical animation industry.
Motion Graphics Animation: Motion graphics-style MoAs are simple, fast-paced and punchy stories that take a high-level view of the science, and may be suitable for audiences that don't require the in-depth scientific rigor and accuracy inherent in more 3D depictions. Because they don't have the same level of visual detail, they can't depict the science with the same level of precision as fully rendered 3D, but that can be an advantage when the story is more focused on context and high-level concepts such as supply chain or emotional impact on patient experience.
Whiteboard Animation: Whiteboard animations are time-lapse video of whiteboard drawing creation, edited together and accompanied by spoken narration. The major benefit of these animations is that they can be executed in a very short amount of time and with minimum cost, making them accessible to companies at the earliest stages of fundraising. As long as the creators of the whiteboard animation have a complete understanding of the subject, strong drafting skills, and well-developed storytelling ability, the whiteboard animation can be a cost-effective, friendly, and informal way to tell a story.
Which Technologies Can Benefit from MoA Videos?
Novel drugs and therapies that operate on newly identified pathways benefit tremendously from MoA animation, because often the audiences have only a partial understanding of the science involved. Molecular and cellular animations are uniquely suited to provide useful information and context to help healthcare providers and investors understand precisely whether and why the drug being described is the best choice for patients.
Biotech companies that have developed a novel platform for drug discovery or other research often have very complicated explanations of how their technologies work. A video describing the precise mechanism by which they are able to achieve their results can optimize understanding by clients or investors, equipping them with the information they need to engage with the company in an informed way.
Medical Devices often employ innovative and unique functionality to achieve a surgical result. Medical device animations can describe how a device functions with clarity and detail that can't be accomplished by live video or simple diagrams. Features of anatomy and/or the device can be made transparent or invisible, allowing the animation to show what can't be seen.
How to Plan Your Next MOA Video
First, identify what you want your audiences to know. This will be critical in determining how your story should be told. Then, you'll need to find an excellent scientific animation studio who can understand your scientific message and create a compelling narrative that maximizes viewer engagement. We contend that we are among the best in the world at this, and if you'd like us to prove it to you, on time and on budget, fill out our contact form to schedule a free consultation.
We are pleased to announce four wins, including two platinum and two gold, at this year's MUSE Creative Awards. Check out the winning animations below.
The Science of Sugaring Hair Removal – The Kennedy Theory®
For Client: Alexandria Professional®
Gold Winner
By: Tziporah Thompson
Imagine you’ve just received a message from your doctor’s office asking to discuss some test results from an annual check-up. A spike of anxiety washes through your system. You sit with your doctor, who explains that the ABC test came back with a result of 123 which is over the normal amount of XYZ. You nod, make the appropriate “oh, uh huh” noises, and chuckle at whatever the doctor says to lighten the mood. You’re then sent home with a packet of printed information you’ll probably never read.
We’ve all experienced this scenario, or are close to someone who has. But does anyone actually come away with a comprehensive understanding of what to do next?
Clearly there is a communication problem here, and luckily there may be a solution; educating with videos. And not just videos, but animations. There are 3 reasons that medical animations can help drive patient engagement in a healthcare setting:
Low Barrier to Entry
By using moving images paired with voice-over, an animation provides the patient with two avenues of sensory input for processing information. This doubles the chances of comprehension; if they don’t understand a word said, they may infer meaning through the context of the visuals, and vice versa. Studies have shown that a patient's short-term understanding of a topic after watching a video is much higher than after reading a document or even having a personal consultation with a healthcare provider.
Relatability & Role-Modeling
In his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud breaks down what makes a simple cartoon face –😐– so universally appealing: “The more cartoony a face is, the more people it could be said to describe…when you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself.” This observation has profound meaning for all simplified visualizations of the real world. When we create illustrations or animations of the inner workings of our bodies, the simplification allows us to project our own experience onto what we are watching and thus feel more connected to the scenario.
Neural Advantage
It’s old news at this point that videos on social media generate more engagement (measured by clicks, time spent watching, and follow-up actions) than still images paired with text. Even in instances where we’d rather keep scrolling, our brain is literally programmed to focus on moving objects. The benefit here being that a nervous patient who lacks the attention necessary to focus on text or someone speaking may have an easier time focusing on an animation with colorful visuals and soothing music.
Ultimately, the fundamental breakdown of communication between healthcare provider and patient is a critical problem in the healthcare industry, particularly for low-literacy communities. By helping a patient better understand their personal role in their recovery journey, we can help improve their outcomes. Medical and scientific animations can be the key to making that happen.
Cameron talks about the early years at Microverse, the future of AI in medical animation and poaching Blockbuster employees with Dave Koss and Matt Milstead on the Mograph Podcast. Watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify below.
Mograph.com is an online community for motion graphics artists. Check out more amazing content on their site, including interviews, tutorials, articles and even classes.
The global pandemic served as an accelerant to pharma’s late but swift transition to digital marketing. Virtual engagement between reps and HCPs has increased tenfold, with both sides enjoying the advantages of increased flexibility and and better opportunities for customization. Even though reps are now back in the field, there’s no going back to old paper practices. 2023 will be all about virtual convergence, personalized digital content, and AI-enabled analytics to create targeted and tailored marketing campaigns. Here are five top trends to watch:
1. Self-Service E-detailing
E-detailing is the digitization of traditional print materials used by pharma reps, allowing HCPs to view materials online. Self-service e-detailing is the next evolution, delivering a self-guided content experience HCPs can engage with at their convenience. The result is increased time spent with material, and thus greater comprehension/retention on the HCP side, and improved delivery on the rep side, since the content does the heavy lifting. This means high-quality illustration, video, moa medical animations, and other custom content has never been more important as pharma continues its transition to digital marketing.
2. Video Marketing
Over 80% of online content is video, and that number grows every day. The omnipresence of video is undeniable, and marketers agree that video content helps increase traffic and dwell time on sites, enhances audience comprehension of products and services, and directly increases sales. And digital video is proving to be less costly and more effective than mainstream television advertising because of its superior ability to target and convert distinct populations, making mobile video the prime medium for digital pharma marketing in 2023 and beyond. Pharmaceutical animations developed to explain a drug's specific mechanism of action now have the ability to reach far greater numbers of HCPs and investors, and for far less, than ever before.
3. Social Listening
Social media plays a critical role in smart pharma marketing, but reaching patients, providers, and physicians effectively online requires skilled analysis of the voluminous available data. Social listening allows marketers to monitor online conversations and collect publicly available data across all social networks, delivering deep insights into patient sentiments, cultural differentiators, language nuances, and other key metrics that allow brands to make meaningful connections and conversions.
2. Modular Content
The MLR (medical, legal, and regulatory) review process in pharma is notoriously onerous, even as marketers require ever-increasing customization in content to engage with providers. Add to that the transition to virtual meetings, and the content reps use to communicate with HCPs has never been more important. Enter modular content. Instead of requiring MLR approval for each asset, marketing departments are developing pre-approved individual content modules that can be used to assemble custom presentations tailored to the audience. Videos, pharmaceutical animation and illustration, charts and graphs, headlines and core claims can be ported into channel-specific templates, enabling content creation primed for a faster review process and highly tailored to the audience. Over time, brands will create module libraries that support robust and sophisticated omnichannel marketing.
5. AI / Machine Learning
The pharmaceutical industry is rich in data, and it recently has adopted even more stringent and disciplined approaches to data collection and management. The application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to these volumes of data means companies can transcend the largely descriptive outputs of analysis, moving into predictive models that enable sophisticated pattern recognition and deep insights. Key predictions being targeted are Customer Affinities, allowing the personalization of tactics that enable marketers to communicate the right message at the right time; Next-best Actions and Suggestions will empower pharma marketers to predict the most effective customer journey for any given patient, based on real-time data; Patience Switch Propensity and Adherence will help brands predict when and why patients might switch to competitor therapies. One estimate suggests that even a 1% increase in patience adherence can add up to $100 million in sales; Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Mapping and Influencer Networks is another way Machine Learning/AI will allow pharma marketers to identify leading healthcare professionals and the ways they influence their networks, enabling effective recruitment of KOLs for collaboration on product launches and speaking programs.
Sources:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-marketing-trends-pharmaceutical-industry-ajitha-surendran/
https://www.anthillagency.com/self-service-detailing
https://www.pharmexec.com/view/how-digital-will-redefine-the-role-of-the-rep-in-2021-and-beyond
https://www.zs.com/content/dam/pdfs/Boosting_Pharma_Sales_With_Marketing_AI.pdf
https://www.demandsage.com/video-marketing-statistics/
https://www.fiercepharma.com/sponsored/6-ways-pharma-brands-can-optimize-social-listening-tech
For Client: Apertor Pharmaceuticals
Apertor is an early stage biotech company that has developed a synthetic biology platform based around a family of molecules called “molecular glues.” With this technology, new drugs can be made by harnessing bacterial enzymes’ ability to create highly modular units that interact with human cells in specific and highly directable ways. While the details of the technology remain secret, the core principles of how it works are straightforward: it combines the functionality of one well understood molecule with the functionality of another, providing a method of directly programming cellular behaviors without genetic modification or the tricky science surrounding the development of fusion proteins.
To create a scientific animation that told the story faithfully, the team at Microverse Studios kept the story focused on the high-level message rather than getting into the details of the molecular interactions. In order to do this, we developed the visual language of robotic components to represent the molecular machines being described. Some of the molecular components are also poorly characterized currently, and so the robot metaphor allowed the complete story to be told with conceptual accuracy critical to all medical animation, even in the absence of real molecular data to display.
For Client: BioSkryb Genomics
Cancer is the result of evolution on a cellular scale, selecting for ever more successful traits of survival, proliferation, and mobility. A single sample from a tumor can contain hundreds of thousands of cells, each one containing mutations and gene expression patterns that are the result of its own unique lineage within the tumor. Samples are destroyed as they are analyzed, and so any information not captured is lost forever. Conventional methods that probe single cells reveal only a tiny portion of the genomes, missing important information that could otherwise drive valuable insights. ResolveOME combines a unique method of measuring every cell in a sample, quantifying not only its genome and mutation profile, but also its entire transcriptome—that is, how genes are being expressed. All of this data is analyzed by BioSkryb’s Base Jumper software to provide previously impossible deep insights into how cancer develops, hides from the immune system, and responds to therapies and changes in its environment.
The story is about BioSkryb’s ability to peer inside otherwise simplistic cell samples to see the galaxy of valuable information inside. To produce this scientific animation for such a unique CRO, the team at Microverse Studios made use of light and color to drive the sense of biological shapes giving way to electric data, while motifs of sparks and stars communicate the sheer volume of valuable information to be accessed in every cell.
For Client: Aulos Bioscience
Cancer scientists have long known about IL-2, the cytokine that “melts tumors” because of how it activates the immune system in the tumor microenvironment. The problem is that after some time IL-2 also triggers immune suppression, undermining its own therapeutic effects. This is why it’s known as a “double-edged sword.” Aulos developed AU-007, a monoclonal antibody that binds to the part of IL-2 that leads to immunosuppression. When delivered on its own, AU-007 allows the body’s circulating IL-2 to build up and increase the immune response to tumors, eventually reaching tumor-melting, therapeutic levels, without ever triggering immunosuppression. When delivered alongside IL-2 therapeutics, it allows for smaller and more effective doses with longer-lasting effects.
A tumor microenvironment with an active immune response is considered “hot,” while one without much immune involvement is considered “cold.” To produce this mechanism of action animation, the team at Microverse Studios used cold and warm light to clearly differentiate “cold” and “hot” tumor microenvironments, evoking motifs of fire and glacier caves while keeping microanatomical and molecular structures and events accurate, as is always critical in medical animation.
For Client: Sound Agriculture
Selective breeding of crop plants for desirable traits such as frost or drought resistance, or flavor and nutritional profile, can take as many as ten growing seasons, as cultivars are crossed to zero in on the desired strain. Sound Agriculture has developed On-Demand Breeding, a method of soaking germinating seeds in transcription factors that trigger specific gene expression profiles within the seed. The genes are already present in the plant, but these transcription factors cause epigenetic changes that alter how those genes are expressed. With only a few germination cycles, the desired traits can be augmented in months rather than years, allowing revolutionary control of how crops can be modified, all without genetic engineering.
Typically, agricultural stories don’t have such deep roots in molecular biology, and their audiences aren’t used to the same level of scientific depth as other biotech and pharmaceutical animations. To tell this story, the Microverse Studios team had to simultaneously accurately portray the science of epigenetics, while emphasizing the specific effects the process could achieve. Elements of light and heat were utilized to create a perception of activity and a sense of magic, while live footage was interspersed to tether the message to the human story.