Are you looking to start a medical animation and wondering how long it will take? Or maybe you’re interested in the most efficient ways to run your medical animation project?
Adding animation to your marketing can be a valuable investment, as it’s a popular medium used to engage and connect with audiences worldwide. It’s a creative format that can demonstrate medical device scenarios that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to film, such as procedural animations, mechanism of action animations, or animations that educate your audience on complex technologies like advanced energy and their impact on tissue.
While you might want to add animation to your marketing, you may be concerned about how long a project like this might take. This article will break it down and map out which factors could make the animation production longer or shorter.
Different types of animations and how long they take
There are three main types of animations that you can choose from, all of which vary in production length:
2D animations: 6 – 10 weeks
These are traditionally line drawings or flat images that have been brought to life through animation. They are used to tell simple stories, such as patient educational videos.
3D animations: 8 – 12 weeks
These are some of the most complex forms of animation that you can create and are typically used for product tutorials, procedure animations, or mechanism of action animations, as they depict things in a 3D world that wouldn’t necessarily be possible or practical to film.
Whiteboard animation: 5 – 8 weeks
These are popular animations used to tell a story by drawing simple images supported by text and a voiceover. They are fantastic for explaining complex technologies as they can slowly draw information in a stepwise way, helping your audience to digest one concept at a time.
To learn more about the different types of animation and video that you can add to your marketing, check out our complete breakdown.
These are estimated times for creating your animation, but the timeline could be shorter or longer depending on the complexity of the animation you want to create and how long your animation needs to be. These estimates have been created based on a 2.5-minute animation.
What could extend your animation process?
This section of the article will run through all the things that could impact the production length of your medical device animation project and why.
The complexity of animation
When it comes to creating animations, the more you include, the longer it will take, especially when it comes to 3D animation. This isn’t just about the number of scenes; it’s also about the movement in each scene.
- Every movement will need to be rigged and manually programmed.
- Each new scene will need to be set up with the correct lighting in the artificial environment.
- Every item in the scene will need to be modeled and rigged in 3D software. Just imagine the amount of work that will be needed for a crowd of people walking through different rooms in a hospital.
All of this contributes not only to the creation and production process but also to the rendering process, as more complex animations can take longer in the render farm than simpler ones.
In regard to 2D animations, the process is relatively similar, although less time-consuming as you only have a 2D environment to worry about. The more illustrations and moving parts needed in the animation, the longer the animator will spend creating it, thus increasing the expense.
The length of animation
As mentioned before, the length of your animation will drastically affect the project timeline. This is because the longer the project, the more time it will take to script, storyboard, draw, animate, and render your final animation.
Your timeline can also be lengthened by other factors, such as sourcing and recording a voiceover, or finding suitable background music that suits the length of the animation.
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Rendering out your animation
When creating a 3D animation, rendering out your animation is one of the most costly and time-consuming parts of the process. Essentially, rendering an animation is like exporting your video in very high detail.
Rendering a 3D 2.5-minute animation takes, on average, 2 weeks. This depends on the quality of the final animation (e.g., frames per second and screen resolution – do you want 4K or is 1080p suitable?). Given the time this takes and the cost, you want to make sure that you only do this once in the process. This means that if you are uncertain about any part of your animation, it is vital that you make changes before it starts the rendering process.
To learn more about the rendering process, have a look at our article on the difference between a camera preview and a final render.
What is the best way to shorten the duration of your animated project?
Having a clear direction and understanding of the animation process
One of the main reasons why animation projects extend past their estimated timelines is due to unclear direction at the start.
The key to success with animations is having a clear direction in what you want from this project and providing all the required assets and information to your agency at the beginning. Otherwise, you’ll waste time creating animations that aren’t suitable, meaning you have to start the process or part of the process again.
Make sure that when you start your project, you know:
- What is the purpose of your animation?
- What do you want your animation to look like? Previous examples or examples of other animation styles you like can be great here.
- What message or information would you like to convey with your animation?
A good tip for making sure that you and your animation team are on the same page is to send them lots of examples of what you’re hoping your animation will look like and to have a call with them to talk through the vision.
Having the right people on board at each milestone
Another reason why projects extend is when companies don’t bring the right people into the process from the very beginning. Waiting until a later stage of the animation to bring in a decision-maker can mean you have to go all the way back to the beginning.
This will lead to costly and time-consuming changes that could have been made easier if this person had been brought in sooner. To avoid this, you ideally want the approver to be more engaged with the project and involved in the approval process for each milestone.
Adding animations to your marketing?
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of the animation process and some of the factors which could affect the length of this process.
However, in the end, there are really only two things that will affect the length of production from the outset: how long you want the animation to be and how complex you need it to be.
Once these have been established, everything else can be avoided through clear communication with your animation development team.