As we continue to move towards digital forms of communication and rely on social media platforms to spread urgent healthcare messages, we’ve needed to incorporate new modes of connection like video in order to adapt. Whether you need to reassuringly explain a procedure to patients or guide them through heaps of new information, you can rely on video as a comprehensive, invaluable tool that will create ease and understanding. In this guide, we’ll discuss what you should consider when commissioning or crafting a healthcare video and provide tips on how to structure a successful one.
Video presents you with the perfect opportunity to overcome the knowledge barrier in which doctors and patients often find themselves in, so make sure to take full advantage of this. By focusing solely on videos that translate industry-specific jargon and complicated ideas into clear visuals and a concise script, you’ll be able to forge better understanding and gift patients with the ability to make informed, empowered decisions. People are already overwhelmed by what they are facing, and the last thing they need is an exhausting, hard-to-grasp explanation that leaves them feeling even more concerned. Take the pressure off doctors and the weight off patients with a simplified video that can be watched, re-watched and understood whenever ready.
Check out our video & animation work in the healthcare sector.
When it comes to choosing your healthcare videos’ medium, consider whether live action or animation better suits your specific aims. Creating a supportive healthcare environment can be achieved no matter what you choose, but for videos that set out to explain procedures or internal processes, you’ll want to do so in an abstracted way – a task for which animation is the perfect choice. Bringing concepts down to earth and ensuring trust, however, is better achieved through live action, where interviews with healthcare professionals serve as a reassurance – that patients can put their full confidence into their healthcare provider.
It’s important to break down animation into both traditional and 3D if you want to properly harness the advantages of each. While both serve as a simplified ways to visualize otherwise difficult subjects, 3D is best when you want technical accuracy – explanations that require knowledge of scale and depth. Hand-drawn animation on the other hand excels at the opposite; through its limitless creative potential, you can draw on emotion, symbolization and stylization to express subjects such as mental health, an example showcased by our animation “Understanding Anxiety”. By coming up with an out-of-the-box way to demonstrate the otherwise unseen internal battle of anxiety, we were able to help both people struggling and their loved ones to understand the condition better.
Our anxiety animation has been viewed over 100,000 times on social media!
It’s important then to consider how you are representing the characters in your healthcare video. In most scenarios, you’ll want to take focus away from the character and more on the processes or ideas, whether that’s so the important information is highlighted or so the patient can better project themselves onto the video. Using stylized, blank characters was an option we utilized during our collaboration with Dignity Health, allowing their services to integrate seamlessly with the viewer without bias or distraction. If your characters are less stylized however, make sure to include diversity in your video – in both scenarios, we need to make sure patients can see themselves in the video and know that whatever it is you are offering – support, guidance or an explanation, is inclusive and supportive of them.
If you would like to learn more about the process of creating a healthcare video, feel free to contact us at hello@synima.com.
