Choosing a healthcare animation partner: What Pharma and NHS teams should look for

Making animation for pharma and healthcare isn’t harder than making it for anyone else. It’s just different. The approval processes are more involved, the stakes are higher if something’s wrong, and a lot of people need to sign things off before anything goes live. A studio that makes lovely brand films might have no idea how to work within all that, and you tend to find out at the worst possible moment.

We’ve been making healthcare animation from our London studio for over twenty years, for pharma companies, NHS trusts and health charities. Here’s what we think matters when you’re choosing who to work with.

Still deciding whether animation is the right format at all? We’ve written about why animation works so well for public health campaigns.

This sounds obvious, but it’s the thing that catches people out. If you’re a pharma company, your animation has to sit within the ABPI Code of Practice. If you’re an NHS trust, there’s clinical governance and brand guidelines to work with. If it’s patient-facing, health literacy and accessibility have to be right. None of this is optional, and none of it should come as a surprise to the studio you hire.

When we made 24 animated training modules for Pfizer, every script went through legal and training sign-off before we animated a single frame. Our finance transformation film for AstraZeneca had to be accurate enough for finance professionals around the world, and engaging enough that they’d actually want to watch it. Nobody needed to explain the approval process to us. We just got on with it.

A good test is to ask a studio how they’d handle medical, legal and regulatory review on your project. If the answer is vague, that tells you what you need to know.

This is the part we love. Someone hands us a dense clinical document, a treatment pathway, a set of compliance guidelines, or a public health message that needs to reach people who don’t respond to traditional health comms. Our job is to turn it into something clear, watchable and accurate.

We’ve made patient education films for King’s College Hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’ where the consultants needed to trust the clinical detail and the patients needed to understand it. For METRO Charity, we made sexual health animations for young people, where the tone had to be direct and honest without a hint of a lecture. We’ve also created mental health resources, public health campaigns for Public Health England, and clinical training for some of the biggest names in pharma.

Every one of those projects needed a different voice, a different visual style and a different way of thinking about the audience. That’s the craft, and it isn’t something you pick up on your first healthcare job.

Something a lot of organisations don’t think about early enough is what happens when things change. Clinical guidelines get updated. NICE recommendations shift. A drug’s indication changes. If your animation contains specific claims or data, there’s a good chance it will need updating at some point.

This is where animation really earns its keep. Nothing needs reshooting. A voiceover line gets re-recorded, a number changes on screen, a section gets restructured. Quick, clean, done.

That only works if the original was built with updates in mind. We keep all our project files, so we can make changes without starting again from scratch. It’s worth asking any studio you’re considering whether they do the same.

Pharma and healthcare: AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Takeda, Public Health England, the NHS, Department of Health, King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’, Great Ormond Street Hospital, NHS Professionals, Amicus Therapeutics, the Royal College of Nursing.

Charities: British Red Cross, Mind, METRO, the British Heart Foundation, Age UK, Shelter, Citizens Advice, Centrepoint, Versus Arthritis, Malnutrition Taskforce, Dravet Syndrome UK, MSIF and Sue Ryder.

Our work covers pharmaceutical corporate animation, compliance training, patient education, public health campaigns, HIV awareness, sexual health content for young people, mental health resources and clinical training. We know the frameworks, the processes and the audiences. And we know how to make work that sits within all of those constraints and still makes people want to press play.

What sign-off points should a pharma animation have?

We build in two: script and visual concept first, then storyboards. That gives medical, legal and regulatory reviewers a clear view of exactly what’s being made before animation starts. Changes are cheap up to that point and expensive after it.

Can a healthcare animation be updated when clinical guidelines change?

Yes, as long as it was built for it. Voiceover lines, on-screen data and whole sections can be changed without reshooting or starting again. We keep every project file, so updates are quick.

Can one animation work for both patients and healthcare professionals?

Often, yes. A patient version can be adapted for HCPs, and the same project can give you social cuts and stills for print and presentations. It’s much cheaper to plan this in from the start.