HEAL

While browsing around the Internet the other day looking for things related to medical animation, I found this site. ghOst Productions, Inc. (and no, the capitalization is not a mistake) is “a 3D medical animation studio that specializes in promotional marketing, surgical technique, and surgeon and patient education.” Their clients are mostly medical device companies like CardioKinetix, Alphatec Spine, K2 Medical, or Spine Surgical Innovations. However, they have also done work for the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, PBS, A&E Networks, and National Geographic, among others.

So, what exactly is cool about ghOst Productions, Inc.? Pretty much everything. But there is one movie in particular that I really like (and have watched over a half-dozen times by now). It’s called Heal, and it is a demo reel that they created to display the various orthopedic procedures that they are capable of animating. In their own words,

“This reel was built from the ground up to showcase the talents of ghOst Productions at the 2009 American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons in Las Vegas. Instead of showing pre-existing client work in our reel, we thought it would be more fun to make a character animation, break nearly every bone in his body and then surgically repair him in under 3 minutes.”

So here’s the link. Now go watch it and then come back and finish reading.

If you are reading this and you still haven’t watched it, well…. go watch it. Seriously. It’s that good.

So, let me elaborate on what exactly it is that I like about this movie.
First, the music. Now I realize that music is neither medical nor animated, but I love music and I think it has incredible power to enhance the emotional experience of any film. In this little short, the music starts off gentle and beautiful, and then pauses on that long, tense violin note as the camera follows his glasses all the way down to the ground and they shatter (foreshadowing, of course, what if going to happen to him.) Then, as he falls, the music turns darker and more frantic, and then slows and becomes mournful as we see the maintenance man’s horrified expression and the surgeons’ masked faces. Then, as the surgical procedure begins, the music becomes more synthesized and techno-influenced. And at the end, as we see that the artist is back to full health, the music once again becomes hopeful and triumphant.  It’s a huge range of emotions to cover in so short a time, and the music really helps make the animation more effective.

Secondly, I think they did a really great job with all the materials, textures and lighting. The chapel is breath taking, the artists eyes are super realistic, and his clothing looks like real clothing with real paint stains on it. Also, the x-ray-like views that they use when he is falling and during the surgery part is a great way to show exactly what they want people to see without having to distracting the audience with extraneous information. That, in fact is one of the main reasons why medical animations can be so helpful. Using animations similar to this (though probably with less story involved) doctors are able to give patients a good idea of the type of surgery that they are about to undergo without having to see all the blood and other organs that would be present in an actual video of the procedure. For example, while browsing through Wikipedia, I found this picture of a femur replacement. (WARNING: this image is graphic! If you don’t like the sight of blood, I advise you not to look at it). In contrast to an image like this one, a medical animation can give patients a lot of information about the procedure without terrifying them by showing a lot of blood and organs.

And that is a very cool thing.

Drew Berry

Drew Berry is a very cool guy. He works as a biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) and has been there for over a decade. Born in New York, he moved to Australia to attend the University of Melbourne where he received a Bachelor of Science degree and then a Master of Science degree for his work using time-lapse microscopy to study human cells. He started animating in 1995 when a friend gave him a copy of Infini-D. Over the next few years, he continued to animate on the side, and work as “the Photoshop guy” at WEHI during the day. He then started some work on some animations explaining the life cycle of the malaria parasite using new data that some of his fellow scientist at WEHI had discovered and an education copy of 3ds Max. These animations proved to be quite popular and jumpstarted him into a full Career in Medical animation. Since then, he has switched to using Maya (which I think is cool because that's the program I use in all my animation classes) and his work has been featured in documentaries, TV shows, museums and art galleries in Australian, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, France, and the US. This year, Drew Berry was awarded with a MacArthur fellowship. (If you don’t know what that is, look here)

However, besides being awesome and relatively renowned, he is also pretty approachable. Let me explain. After learning about Mr. Berry and doing some research on his work, I decided to e-mail him and see if he had any helpful hints for someone doing research on biomedical animation and interested in possibly pursuing it as a career. I sent an email on a Friday morning and by that night I had already received a reply. He had a few good tips that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own and also referred me to a few different website that were pretty cool. I was planning on actually writing what he said and which websites he recommended, but I just went back into my e-mails and re-read it and found a little note in the “letterhead” at the bottom stating that the information in the e-mail is confidential and asking that I not print, share, forward, disclose, or use it without asking permission first. So, sorry, but I’m just going to tell you that it was pretty helpful, cool stuff and if you want to know for yourself, you could e-mail him yourself and I’m sure he’d be happy to answer you.

A few more interesting things before finishing up this post:

I realized that I watched Mr. Berry’s Malaria parasite video my freshman year when doing some research for a Health Promotion class I was in. Also, while looking through some other things that Mr. Berry has animated, I found one that my molecular biology professor had shown us part of one of his pieces depicting DNA replication. So, even though I hadn’t even heard of Drew Berry before starting this blog, I was already familiar with some of his work.