Street Anatomy

The World’s Most Viewed Medical Animation

Visualizing childbirth has never been so exciting. Nucleus Medical Art, a medical illustration, animation and interactive media company, created this beautiful animation, which has quickly become the most popular medical animation on YouTube. Within the first day of being posted it received over 10,000 views. Since then it has been viewed over 670,000 times on YouTube and over 1,500,000 times on the company’s web site in the past year alone.

So what makes this animation so popular? Its simplicity and gracefulness. It focuses solely on the baby, the uterus, and the spine. And yet, you still get a sense of the struggle, the inherent pain, and the overall complexity of childbirth. I just can’t get broken down any further.

I asked the CEO and Co-Founder of Nucleus Medical Art, Ron Collins, if the popularity of the animation on YouTube has resulted in any direct business or if it has been a worthwhile marketing tool.

He says, “We upload animations to YouTube as part of an overall strategy of improving our web presence. We’ve tracked over 2,000 clickthroughs from our YouTube animations since we put them up six months ago, and at least one direct inquiry that led to a licensing deal. When you consider we’ve had over 1,000,000 total views of our animations, that’s only 2/10th of 1 percent.

Even though virtually all of the traffic has been from non-customers, there is a benefit to having a link back to our home page, and there might be a benefit to showing customers the number of views the medical animations garner on YouTube as a way to let clients see how intrinsically popular the animations are.”

Ron brings up a great point by mentioning that he uses the number of views as evidence of popularity when showing clients. If the general public on the web finds your animation interesting, you can be sure that your client’s audience will also find it interesting.

Placing your medical animation or demo reel on such huge social sites like YouTube opens it up to critique by the whole world. It sounds a bit daunting, but with so few medical animations present on these sites, you can be sure it will be viewed.

Hopefully there will be a YouTube-like site dedicated to medical animation someday. Maybe that will be my next project. Just a thought!

A Must-See Medical Animation Showreel by Casey Steffen

Steffen Vfx Showreel 2007 from Casey Steffen on Vimeo.

Casey Steffen is a 3D Artist, Compositor, Writer, Storyboard artist, Concept artist AND a Medical illustrator. He received his Masters in Biomedical Visualization from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has worked for prestigious animation studios such as Anatomical Travelogue and Presto Studios.

Check out his portfolio at steffenvfx.com

Ever Wonder why you get a Hangover after a Night of Drinking?

This is part of the new documentary entitled “Inside the Living Body” on the National Geographic Channel. It premiered last Sunday and will air again this Saturday, Sept. 22. It follows our first moments in life to the final breakdown of our bodies. By seamlessly blending 3D models, CGI, and real footage it creates the illusion of a journey through a living body.

Unfortunately, I don’t get the National Geographic Channel so if anyone saw it please let me know your thoughts!

Take a wild ride through the body

Does anyone know who created this medical animation?

Great camera angles and use of multiple camera views.

[via Biosingularity and Sciencroll]

Medical Illustrator David Bolinsky among the world’s greatest thinkers and doers

David Bolinsky, medical illustrator and founder of XVIVO an award-winning medical animation studio, is one of the latest speakers at the annual TED conference. XVIVO teamed up with Harvard to create the one medical animation we’ve all come to know and love, the Inner Life of the Cell.

In case you haven’t heard of it, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference bringing together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers. Some of the top speakers include, Al Gore, Bono, Seth Godin, Eve Ensler, Jane Goodall, and John Maeda to name a few.

It is such an honor to have David Bolinsky included among these select set of speakers at TED!

Watch his talk on exposing the beauty and truth in science to help teach students molecular and cellular biology.

Read my previous posts on XIVO’s Inner Life of the Cell animation:

Inner Life of a Cell: the Full Length Version

Interview with David Bolinsky of XVIVO Scientific Animation

Spotlight: John Liebler

The Inner Life Of A Cell