Surgical Frost.
OR-X, the surgical research and training center at Balgrist University Hospital, was launching a new courses website and wanted a film to announce it. I started from a material rather than a look: one custom surface, designed to stand for how the center works. Everything in the film is made of it.
Something precise, not just something pretty.
A surgical research and training center is judged on clarity and precision, so the film had to be too. I built a custom material for it and tuned it by experiment until the light behaved: frosted, translucent, softly glowing, clean rather than cold. Every course tile in the film is a physical object made of it, and it is specified like an element because that is how it was arrived at.
Their own teal, under real light.
OR-X already had a signature colour. Rather than sit it flat on a background, I put it inside a material and lit it with physically accurate raytracing, so the same #00B0A5 arrives with depth, refraction and a highlight. The brand is unchanged. It just gets to behave like a surface.
Agreed on the board first.
Before a frame was rendered, the whole film existed as a shotlist and artstyle overview on one board. This is draft one, the version the work was approved from, which is why nothing had to be renegotiated halfway through a render.
Open the full board →
Three beats, no filler.
The film says one thing and then shows it: the line assembles, the courses page arrives, the filter opens. Short enough to be watched to the end on the page it was announcing.
The UI, rebuilt to move.
The course platform was rebuilt in Illustrator so every panel, button and filter was a real layer, then animated in After Effects. That is what lets the filter open as glass with actual refraction, instead of a screen recording with a zoom on it.
What went out.
The finished announcement, in the material it was designed around.
See the rest of the OR-X work →What we ended up with was well received by surgeons, industry partners and our board.
Navin Joshi · Marketing & Communications · OR-X