Arthritis Patient Diaries

PLBR, a brand communications agency approached us to create 2 patient led animations for their healthcare client.

Initially the animations would be shown at EULAR, the European Congress for Rheumatology where several thousand Rheumatologists and members of the scientific community would be present.

The aim was to help delegates fully understand the impact of living with SpA from the perspective of a patient.

PLBR created an immersive experience at the congress demonstrating what it feels like to be a patient with SpA.

The Patient Diaries we created were used as part of this experience and our brief was to ensure that the animations were visually impacting and that they clearly communicated the story.

This is Steven's diary. We hope you like it...

Final animation of Steven's Diary. If it's looking compressed, click on the vimeo icon for hi res.

As part of the design process we decided that rotoscoping would be used within the animation; we all wanted something quite naturalistic, in order to reflect the emotional content of the stories.

Rotoscoping itself is simply tracing, frame by frame, by hand, over filmed footage.

For the shot above for example, with the patient slowly rotating on a chair while a doctor examines him, we filmed one of our animators sitting on a chair and we span him around a few times. Once he had recovered we brought the video footage into Photoshop, took every third or fourth frame and drew over it; so eight to ten frames per second.

After hiding the video layer, what you’re left with is a really nice line-art sketch of an animated human figure, which you can clean up and refine before adding shading and colour, as well as drawing in any extra elements you might wish to include.

On average, a ten-to-fifteen second shot would take around a day for initial line art, then another half day for colour & shade.

The same goes for every scene in the animation where characters move; all of them are based on filmed footage, using various members of staff as stand-ins. We even brought our Creative Director's boys in on the action, filming them in their garden at home playing football. We really wanted to bring out the emotion from the story and this scene certainly gets our CD every time!