It isn’t an easy job to make people fall in love with the difficult concepts of life sciences. However, Cameron Slayden has been successfully doing it for more than two decades. His brainchild, Microverse Studios, is a company that produces 3D scientific animations to help biotech and pharmaceutical companies explain how their technologies operate on a cellular and molecular level.
Microverse Studios has recently added several prestigious awards to its name. In 2021, Slayden decided to see if the videos his company developed for clients could stand up in competitive film awards. Given that the award competitions weren’t for scientific animation, their work had to stand up alongside science fiction, visual effects, and animation for entertainment. Hoping for just one win somewhere, his team entered every competition it could.
They won every time.
The first award that Microverse Studios won was the Videographer’s awards, now known as the Viddies. Emboldened, Slayden entered his team’s work in other competitions.
Microverse Studios bagged its second award at the Muse Creative Awards, taking home top honors alongside the Trolls animated movie and visual effects from Tenet.
They later added Nyx, Hermes, Telly’s, Communicator awards, and more. Slayden’s zoom backdrop is a glass case holding trophies from every award they’ve won over the last two years. The Microverse Studios table at the Association of Medical Illustrators annual awards ceremony was the noisiest as they cheered one accolade after another for their work.
Microverse Studios’ team of animators is also helping to give back to the medical animation community by serving as faculty at the biomedical visualization programs at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Augusta, and the University of Georgia in Athens. There, they provide students with methodical approaches to developing their aesthetics and understanding the software tools at their disposal.
“We’re always expanding,” says Slayden, “and scientific animation is hard to get into. There’s a big learning curve. If we can give the next generation a head start, they’ll be there for us when we’re ready for them. Plus it makes their lives easier as they enter the field, so it’s good for everyone.”
The awards and teaching positions are the natural result of the hard work Slayden, and his team have put into becoming the powerhouse of scientific animation that they are today. Everything from their concept development process to their production and review system and even their hardware and software choices have been carefully designed with the excellence of their end product in mind.
Slayden sees the awards as a metric of success. “If we can make this complicated, Ph.D-level science visually engaging enough to win film awards, then it will be good enough to get our audiences to want to watch them all the way to the end. That’s how we serve our clients.”
Their clients also enjoy the recognition. “Often, these animations go unrecognized by the larger public, because the subject matter is so esoteric and because these companies don’t even consider the idea of submitting them for an award. They are always pleasantly surprised, and it’s another useful way to keep their names in the news cycle,” says Slayden
Biotech startups, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, and even agricultural science companies have used their animation to communicate complex concepts to discerning audiences.To see what all the excitement is about, visit the Microverse Studios website.
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