Animation has become an integral part of scientific research, pharmaceutical, education, and biotech investor-entrepreneur relationships. As a common language across these industries, scientific animations have to be empirically accurate, unambiguous, and eye-catching. Thus, the best animators in this field will be both imaginative and well-versed in the sciences.
This combo of skills in one person is a rare find, and the rarest of them all is Cameron Slayden. Regarded as a leader in the medical animation field, Cameron has 22 years of experience; translating complex medical information into gorgeous 3D illustrations. He and his wife Olivia co-founded Microverse Studios, a company sitting at the summit of converting intricate medical data into precise and breathtaking artwork for the industry’s most progressive biotech companies.
Scientific research often yields results as numbers and graphs. The discoveries are not observable directly in the visible spectrum. Processes occur on such a tiny scale that visible light literally cannot interact with them.
Microverse Studios is a scientific animation studio where Cameron and his team create animated short films that explain scientific breakthroughs to doctors, investors, and businesspeople. Their work helps investors and healthcare providers to make educated decisions and biotech and pharmaceutical companies to efficiently communicate how their technologies operate on a cellular and molecular level. Their work is not just easy on the eyes; according to Slayden, it’s easy on the brain. Many of the features that make Microverse Studios’ work win film awards are deliberate design choices that take advantage of cognitive science to make the learning process more efficient.
“We know that memories with emotional context are more likely to get stored and easily accessed. It’s kind of like a piece of metadata the brain adds onto the information to mark it as important. It’s why we can easily remember more details from our first breakup than we can from our English class from the same year or something like that, even though we spent hundreds more hours in English class.”
Watching the videos available on Microverse Studios website, it starts to become apparent what Slayden means. They are more than scientific infographics. Something about the imagery stirs the soul.
“We also do a lot of work with visual metaphor,” says Slayden. “When someone says ‘your work reminds me of X,’ what they’re really saying is that the information contained in our video has been tied to another easily accessed memory, increasing the efficiency of learning and recall.”
An example of the studio’s work is when it helped a trailblazing therapeutic company, Generate: Biomedicines, impart its pioneering idea of generative biology to the investor audience.
Presenting complicated and novel science efficiently is a common problem in the biotechnology industry. Impressing investors during their short window of attention is a high-stakes effort, and it pays to bring every tool to bear to achieve success. Generate Biomedicines was up against this challenge and sought the services of Microverse Studios to help them with a nine-figure investment raise.
Generate Biomedicines developed a machine learning platform that allows them to design molecules based on desirable features instead of the usual process of screening billions of molecules to try to find the one that is the best fit. This signals a revolution in drug discovery. With all the data and information, the company came to Microverse Studios to find a way to convey its idea in a clear yet engaging way to the investors.
Microverse Studios’ job was to script a story that fully grasped the company’s idea and present it in aesthetically dazzling visual prose. Working their magic, the team at Microverse Studios created an award-winning short film that became the focal point of the discussion, leading to a successful $370 million Series B funding round. You can watch the video here.
That is how Microverse Studios impacts the biotechnology and pharmaceutical circles, acting as a bridge between all stakeholders. As Cameron describes it, “The life sciences are becoming more and more complex, and discovery is advancing at an accelerating rate. Someone has to explain to investors, doctors, and the world at large what these discoveries are and what they mean for humanity, and the only person that can do that is someone who both understands the science and knows how to translate that into a story that can be understood, absorbed, and remembered. That is the goal of Microverse Studios.”
Since 2005, Microverse Studios has worked with many scientists and biotech companies in translating their complex science into impeccable 3D representations. Check out some of the case studies of their peerless work on their website.