As everyone continues to adapt to these ever-changing times, we must all work together and find ways to innovate. This is especially true in the healthcare industry. Making patients comfortable and helping to ease worry is a difficult challenge, but it's one that Dayton Children's Hospital was determined to solve. Introducing, Video Visits!

Dayton Children's Hospital is such a fun brand to work with. Over the years, some of our most wildly creative projects have come out of this partnership, and we’ve established a deep trust and collaborative workflow with the team at Dayton Children’s. This allows the entire Boom Crate team to truly embrace the creative process from start to finish. A lot of times, with this brand, we lean on live-action to tell their powerful stories, but with some of the challenges that come with being in close proximity right now, we decided on animation to provide a platform to walk patients through a standard video visit.

As with every project, the first step in our creative process involves a lot of brainstorming. With this project - Dayton Children’s wanted to help provide a solution to the concerns parents and patients have right now. For this piece, we tried to get inside the heads of the concerned parents and patients to better understand their anxieties, but also highlight how Video Visits are a great solution to a traditional in-person visit. Luckily, Dayton Children's provided detailed explanations on how their process works, along with a little behind the scenes interacting, making this step in the process pretty seamless.

Once we all had a better understanding of how we wanted to walk through this process and asked ourselves some necessary questions, we passed our jumbled notes and "what-ifs..." to our script-writing wizard. As we worked away on getting final words down on paper, we gathered inspiration on how we want it to look and move.…and after a handful of small tweaks, the design team took the polished script and got to work!

Since we’ve established a brand platform for characters and illustration style with Dayton Children’s for this series… (See What to Expect case study here) our thorough pre-production process made the design phase come together pretty quickly. Jake and Anna presented a hand-drawn storyboard to the team, then created a full digital stack of beautifully-executed design frames, ready for animation.

We put our heads together in an attempt to bring justice to such artistic design. To do so, Jake and Hunter challenged us to bring new techniques for these designs. We wanted individuals to feel as if they had a very specific engagement - and the idea of animating mouth movements to bring an additional humanized component to the suite of characters was important to us. Additionally, we experimented with frame rates and textures, to ensure the whimsy of the brand was carried out throughout the entire piece. As we approached the finish line, we passed off a handful of drafts to our friend Andy over at Waveform to start adding sound to help round out the final animation.