Anatomy of a Medical Animation – Migraine

Our regular series that is a behind the scene look at the technical, aesthetic and business considerations that went into creating a particular medical animation movie.

Everyday Health –This is Your Body on a Migraine

Executive Summary

Our client, Everyday Health seeks to empower people to live their healthiest lives, every day. They wanted to raise the awareness of the general public on some common diseases and their pathogenesis. One such condition is Migraine and the medical animation above is the final version for “What Is a Migraine”. What went into the video was similar to a movie; a 1-minute movie, but a movie nonetheless.

Read About the Process (5 mins)

The models

Since the animation was for consumers, the science had to be easy to understand, but also be scientifically and medically defensible and, most of all, interesting.

At Scientific Animations, we meet different challenges with creative solutions. One of the considerations from the client for this animation was to show Cortical Spreading Depression (CSD) phenomenon as a wave of electrical activity across the cortex. The CSD was visualized as waves traversing at the surface level of the brain as opposed to showing a firing activity inside the brain, in a visually appealing way.

The color of the cortical wave was based off a warm color palette visualize pain as sunlight is often a trigger for migraine. Additionally, we could have shown the activity with the focus only on the brain in the frame, but we decided to depict the activity in the brain inside the human layer. This was considered not only to fill the space but to make the scene aesthetically pleasing and easy to follow as well.

Branding

We were driven to create models that the viewer could identify and relate to. We opted to create a 2D/3D combination look that would feel like a hand drawn, hand colored look but still with a detailed resolution that would draw viewers in. The background colors, the clothes, the skin tone, the font selection, the text treatment, and the styles are all chosen to be consistent with the branding and overall mission of our client.

Similar to movie production, we follow a three-stage process for creating a medical animation:

Pre-production: Preparation of storyboard aligned with client’s requirements. Creation texturized, 3D model “characters”. Develop background scenes, with props, add the characters and light the scenes. Check camera views and optimize the scenes for rendering.
Production: Animate the models to reveal the story and render animations into footage.
Post-production: Compositing or stitching together the animation sequences; adding narration, text and visual effects applied to polish the final animation.

With 15 years of experience and thousands of medical animations in our wake, we’ve created systems that allows our clients to trust in the process. Our project managers all have advanced degrees in medical illustration and our production team culture is uncompromising leading to aesthetic and accurate output, allowing clients to sit back, relax, and focus on big picture.