Pharmaceutical Animation

It depends on what the pharmaceutical animation needs to do, where it needs to live and how complex the specific requirements that you have are. There’s three main factors that we assess when putting together a proposal - how complex it is, how quickly you need it, and what design style it needs to be in. A video needed in multiple languages is going to cost more than a single language. A very short production window will mean a bigger team is needed to get the video completed faster. A highly complex style using lots of custom illustrations will be more expensive than simple 2D animated explainer video. 

We will always provide a free, no-obligation proposal with at least 2, often 3 different budgets. This way you can see exactly what you’re going to get, and what the cost associated would be. Drop us a message, or give us a call so we can get a bit more information about what you’re trying to achieve, and likely give a ballpark estimate pretty quickly.

The simple answer is that there isn’t a set time it takes to create an MOA animation, or any animation. It all depends on the complexity of what you’re looking to achieve. If you need multiple languages, multiple aspect ratios and durations for different marketing channels, then that’s going to take longer (or a bigger team) than a single video. If your video needs to pass through legal, compliance or regulatory checks, then that will add time to the process. If you have a number of internal stakeholders that need to approve and sign-off design work, that will influence the timeline. A simple, illustrative MOA animation will take less time than a photorealistic, highly complex 3D MOA animation. 

We typically advise an 8 week turnaround from brief to delivery. This gives you enough time between tasks to get approvals without rushing through. However, we often work on shorter timelines when there is an urgent deadline that needs to be met. In some cases, we’ve produced simple projects for regular clients within a week. If you have a deadline that you absolutely need to meet, drop us an email or give us a call and we’ll be able to tell you if we can meet it.

For clinical trial recruitment you could use a step-by-step process animation that shows potential patients exactly what will happen, and when it will happen. This could be integrated with a timeline animation to show the different stages of the trial and any important milestones. Then you could use a patient journey animation to show daily life before, during and after the trial including information like hospital visits, medications and integrating the trial into their daily lives. You could also use medical animation video to explain side-effects and safety information to highlight any potential risks and show how patients are monitored throughout the trial for safety reasons. 

The style of the animations would depend on your specific aims and objectives. You could use animated characters, incorporate live-action footage, use a motion graphic approach, or photorealistic 3D. We would help to advise based on brand guidelines, budgets, production timings and your objectives.

We have lots of experience creating pharma animations for a global audience. There are a few different ways to tackle this issue in an efficient but effective way. To start with the most simple execution, you can use translated subtitles on an existing ‘primary’ video. For example, create the first video in English with a voiceover and any on-screen text. Then have your different languages subtitled below. The medium execution would be to only have text on screen and not have a voiceover. We can then use translated scripts to change the text on screen to the desired language. Finally, for the most immersive route, you would have your translated script voiced in the different languages and create an animation with each language having its own voiceover, text on screen and subtitles.

We work closely with your team to ensure that everything from the script, through to the style, through to the storyboard is all accurate and compliant. Every step in our process would be presented to you for feedback, any amendments and ultimately sign-off before moving through to the next stage. This means we can create highly tailored and bespoke visuals to your subject matter. At the storyboard stage you will have every frame of the animation drawn in a sketch style before being ‘rendered’ in a high quality version. This is especially useful to legal or compliance teams who can sign off the accuracy and compliance of the animation before anything is actually animated.

We approach every and any project we produce in the same way. Our process has been developed over a decade, and we follow it consistently to ensure that we can guarantee to deliver projects on time and on budget. The process starts with pre-production tasks like information gathering, workshops, script writing and designing mood boards. Then we move into production tasks like style setting (or style frames) and two levels of storyboard development - the sketch storyboard and the final storyboard. Once everything is approved, we continue into post-production where we work on animation, sound design, voiceover recordings and creating any additional videos as part of the scope of work. Finally, we add the finishing touches like sound effects and subtitles. Our process has over 100 steps - but don’t worry, we do most of them! In 2023, we had our process ISO 9001 certified, so we hold ourselves to the highest standards.

We have a wealth of experience working on projects that need to be approved from compliance and regulatory perspectives. Our process has built in review and approval stages to make sure that we don’t progress without your express approval. Often, animation is the perfect medium for these types of projects as the legal, compliance and/or regulatory team can see exactly what is going to be produced in the form of a storyboard. This gives the opportunity to check content, references and claims before the actual animation work is done.

Animation helps to turn complex information into simpler, easier to understand information. Rather than just telling patients, you’re showing them through an on-demand, engaging video. By using clear visual storytelling, you can break down what’s happening to the body and make medical symptoms easier to recognise. Step-by-step animations can show how side effects might appear, when they occur (or are likely to occur) and what those effects might feel like. Patients, like most people, need to actually understand something to be able to recognise it happening.

The sign of any good video, whether an MOA animation or not, is a strong narrative that guides viewers through each step - helping to build understanding as the animation progresses. For MOA videos in particular, it’s key to show accurate, scientific information but in a simple, visual way. This helps to make the video understandable, especially to patients, without losing technical accuracy. A good example of this would be the visualisation of the drug’s journey through the body. The science and information will be highly technical and advanced, but the visuals can be simplified. Those visuals can transition between macro and micro, showing the drug entering the body through to reaching its target.

For pharmaceutical training videos, often the effectiveness is completion rates (how many people watched until the end), and the retention rate of the information. You can measure this through interactive quizzes or surveys to people who received the training. There can also be broader quizzes and surveys to capture feedback on the perceived effectiveness of the training from patients, HCPs or internal stakeholders. Finally, there are more abstract or intangible KPIs you could monitor. Does training time reduce through the use of animated videos, were there fewer reported user errors or better patient compliance? These questions will need some reporting framework set up to capture them, as well as more time to see the changes unfold over time. 

Every project has its own unique measures of success. We’ll work with you as part of our briefing stage to understand what the success of yours looks like.

Depending on the context of the project and your aims, you may be able to use the same animation for both target audiences. However, you may consider using the same core visuals and style with a slightly different script. This way your patient education animation gives the patients more approachable and less technical information compared to the HCPs. As long as the scripts were roughly similar in word count and section/scene lengths, then it would only require a slightly larger budget to account for some extra voiceover work. Repurposing assets for different uses and audiences is a brilliant way to make your animations last longer and be more useful to the intended audience.

We can deliver in a wide range of formats from our software packages. Typically, we supply high quality MP4 files for use in sales presentations, conferences and large format viewing. We also supply alongside it a web-optimised version which has suitable compression and colours for websites, social media and any other digital platforms you may want to use. We can deliver in multiple sizes, formats and lengths depending on the context of use and the device. If you have something specific in mind, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask.

Confidentiality is key to our clients, which is why we can’t show most of the work we produce in pharmaceuticals. We’re happy to sign NDAs to keep sensitive information behind closed doors, and hold all your production team under similar confidentiality clauses. Our team has worked together for years, so we only work with people that we trust. We use technology and software with strong data protection, and project based privileges, so only your team can access your project. Any distribution and communication happens via secure and private channels (like Teams) to comply with IT best practices. We use password protection to secure the sharing of any information or data. Then, once a project is completed, we remove it from the cloud and keep a back-up offline in case of future amends. We can also put in place clear protocols for destroying any confidential information once your project is completed. Finally, the best policy is to only share information that is completely necessary for our scope of work, and re-visit supplied materials after writing the script so we have the very minimum amount of sensitive information needed to fulfil the brief.

2D animation for medical videos is often best for a simplified, stylised explanation. You would use illustration, imagery or graphic design to explain your message. 2D works brilliantly for patient education animation, or detailed information like diagrams, processes, timelines. It keeps complexity easy to approach and understand. It’s generally quicker to produce and more cost effective than its 3D counterpart. 

3D animation for medical videos is better for a greater sense of realism. You can show anatomy, actual medical devices and simulate molecular interactions (particles, forces, gravity, fluids, etc). It gives that further level of depth, and more technical explanations. It’s not unapproachable for a patient viewer, but due to its longer production times and higher associated costs, it's usually deployed on technical explanations for an advanced market. 3D works brilliantly for medical device animation, procedures, demonstrations and detailed mechanism of action animation.

When people know the reason why, or they are bought into the bigger picture, generally they will feel part of something. By properly explaining the trial, the results, the outcomes for people, participants will feel more motivated to stay on the trial and see it through. At each milestone or stage you can give clear visual explanations of what to expect - which can help to reduce worries and help the participants to feel more confident and prepared. You can also use animated videos to boost morale on longer trials, showing them their progress and the contribution it's making to the wider effort.

We have partners with extensive backgrounds in the pharmaceutical and medical industries, often to a PhD level. They can help transform highly complex, technical information into simple language that’s easier to digest. Our team has a long background in creating animated pharmaceutical videos, especially in visual storytelling for pharma videos. Most of our clients have the scientific experts with technical materials already developed, but need help to translate it for a patient audience. We’lll work collaboratively with your scientific experts through various creative tasks to ensure everything we create is completely accurate, whilst having visual storytelling and animation in mind.

The brilliance of using animation is that updates are quick, simple and cost-effective to make - no expensive re-shoots required. If you know at the briefing stage that changes are likely to be made in the future, we can build a modular design that is easy to update in specific sections. We can also work in a future-proofed way, using software that sources the information for us from files like Word documents, meaning text changes are nearly instant. We use this system to translate text-heavy animations into multiple languages, pulling in different language versions from different Word documents. But the same system can be applied to technical information like dosages, drug names, new indications, disclaimers or safety information.

No matter your subject matter, all complex information needs to be explained simply. To do this, you need to break down the complex information into clear, bite-sized chunks. Balance out sections of detail and technical information with sections of simplicity. We all appreciate contrast. Whether that’s the blacks and whites of an image, or the story you tell in the video. Think about information in terms of contrast - how can you balance technical detail with simplicity. You can also make a complex medical device animation more engaging by changing up the animation style - cycling through sections of 2D, 3D, motion graphics. Or you can change the creative visuals that you’re showing. Starting outside the body, then going into the molecular changes, then showing a simulation, then using an abstract visual device, then going back to detail, and repeat. With any video, you need to consider making it understandable, making it memorable, and having plenty of contrast.

Our process has two core philosophies; small steps that build on the step before, and plenty of check-ins to ensure we’re on the right track before going too far. Because of this, we have roughly 6 distinct stages to each project. At each stage we’ll present what we’ve done, wait for your feedback and then incorporate feedback before moving to the next stage. We share the majority of our work in the form of collaborative documents that you can leave comments on. This makes it easy to capture feedback quickly, but also gives a single source of feedback to make amendments straightforward. By working in this way, we can keep compliance, legal and any other stakeholders to your project informed, up to date and across the project as a whole. By working together it means no surprises at the end of the project, and no re-works or updates that might implicate the timeline or the budget.

There is no one rule for the length of a pharmaceutical animation. There are two main indicators of length; who’s going to watch it, and where? You may be speaking to a patient audience, but one video might be for social media, whereas the other video might be educating on a drug they’ve been prescribed by their HCP. If your audience is not necessarily invested in you, or your message, then keep it short. Typically under 30 seconds for social media, and under 60 seconds for conferences or exhibitions. If you’re speaking to a patient audience, try to keep it simple and clear, with a length of 1-2 minutes. If you’re delivering detailed information like a MOA animation, or a scientific video, then under 2 minutes. If you’re making pharmaceutical training videos on complex procedures or highly detailed information then you can run much longer, anywhere from 3 minutes upwards. We’ve worked on pharmaceutical animations that are 30 seconds, and pharmaceutical animations that are 10 minutes. The difference between them is the audience.