Popular science communication is an important part of reaching a larger audience of non-academics. It can help inform them about new research, and educate or inspire them. Elke Miedema plans to produce regular popular science versions of her papers in the form of animations and social media posts. Below is the first episode of her new channel HealthScapes. HealthScapes which will focus on how various (built) environments can affect health.

This first animation is a visual representation of the scoping review health promoting building design for outpatient healthcare. This scoping review was the starting point of Elke’s research into this subject. In this review, numerous papers were looked at to see if they related to outpatient healthcare, building design, and aspects of health promotion. It also answers the question if healing architecture is the same as health promoting building design.

Challenge

The contents of the animation can be divided into three parts: introduction, method, and findings. Each part had its particular challenges, but most revolved around question of how to visualise something quickly and clearly so the visuals keep pace with the tempo of the narration. This often lead to multiple animated icons appearing on screen as a representation of a list of outcomes or search terms. This was combined with a flat overhead perspective view of sketches and papers to provide a link to the architecture background of the research.

A scoping review is quite abstract (pun intended); going through research papers in various steps to see if they are relevant. The challenge here was to visualise that and to convey how broad the search was initially. This was by showing the research papers as physical pieces of paper with various types of content and in different amounts; sometimes a single sheet, other times a whole stack. In combination with a diagram showing relevant parts to each step of the research, the journey to finding the relevant papers is visualised.

Storyboard

Styleframes

End result

Lessons learned

During the project I tried a number of new things in After Effects which mainly related to animating shapes with strokes and keeping strokes consistent throughout. Simple scaling transform animations often weren’t possible as that would scale the stroke as well. To solve this issue I worked with several solutions. Either the shape itself was animated, stoke width was animated or controlled by an expression, or a stroke was added later as a layer effect.

Another aspect which I am still developing is more natural and fluent character motion. In this project that meant animating the arms and hands in the overhead view sections; drawing lines, placing stamps and pushing buttons. It was good to try this type of animation and get a feel for it, but there is a lot more for me to learn in this area.