A single enveloped filamentous ebola virus curls and floats amongst a non-descript clean background.
Key frame of the Ebola virus, by INVIVO.
A single enveloped filamentous ebola virus curls and floats amongst a non-descript clean background.
Key frame of the Ebola virus, by INVIVO.

INVIVO is proud to share the first in a series of animations created in partnership with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

The series profiles some of the deadliest diseases afflicting many parts of the world, in order to educate people and support the vital work of Doctors Without Borders.

“The partnership with INVIVO has given Doctors Without Borders pro-bono access to high quality digital animations for the visualization of diseases and medical conditions that have helped us to not only better tell our patients’ stories, but also to educate our medical teams on the pathologies they are tackling around the world.”
–  Stephen Cornish, Executive Director, Doctors Without Borders

Our team of medical animators jumped at the opportunity, thanks to our corporate initiative to give back, to explain these terrible diseases, which has resulted in a collaborative effort to create educational animations to serve the MSF mission. “For someone with a visual effects background, the Ebola animation certainly helped me have a better understanding of the disease,” said Senior Animator Ralph Sevazlian.

The videos will be accompanied by voiceovers in multiple languages, and you can find playlists in French and English that we will be adding to our YouTube channel. And that presents unique challenges, as Senior Medical Animator J Platt notes. “I worked on the storyboards for the AIDS animation. One of the biggest challenges was creating icons to represent different transmission methods and side effects so that the animation would be understandable to the greatest range of audiences.” Stay tuned for that video in the weeks ahead.

3D medical animation has exploded in recent years, and it’s likely due to the educational value animation provides, as well as the ubiquity of playback devices. In the past, medical animation has been a staple of science documentaries. As was recently noted on Medgadget, “The rise of the smartphone culture has unarguably been the most defining development impacting the global medical animation market. There will be well over 2 billion smartphone users in the world by the end of 2016, various estimates have shown. A sizeable percentage of these users will, at some point in time, consume content centered on surgical procedures, pharmaceutical drug action mechanism, or medical devices.”

Creating these videos speaks to the core of INVIVO’s mission: to transform how people learn about health. “The devastating outbreak of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa hit me hard and the fact that today there is still not effective treatment is quite concerning,” said INVIVO President Andrea Bielecki. “I believe there is much more research and education to be done, so I’m happy we’re able to contribute in a small way with an animation to explain the mechanism of action of Ebola.” A mechanism of action (MOA) video is a cornerstone of our medical animation work, which explains the most up-to-date science behind complex interactions using the latest in 3D and visual effects.

INVIVO Ebola Animation, MSF

As our Producer of Animation Alina Klinaeva notes, “This is absolutely meaningful work, and it’s very clear that the work MSF does has an impact not only doing good in various countries, but also informing the public.”

We can’t think of a better way to realize our vision than to have a partner like MSF who, in their own words, “seeks to alleviate human suffering and to restore dignity to individual human beings, regardless of race, identity, religion or political affiliation.”


Learn more about fighting Ebola, and the vital role of Doctors Without Borders.

Subscribe to INVIVO on YouTube and Vimeo. To contact us about creating medical animation, reach out via email sales@invivo.com or phone 416.703.6264 x201.