Friday, March 25, 2016

3/25/16

A lot has changed, and for the better- I almost feel like bullet-pointing this post. Deadlines have been re-adjusted; the potential TV spot has been moved from mid-April to around June. We've gone from having to rush out a finished product to having the time to really make sure it's what we want. We are in talks with an animation studio that has developed a rough cut of what the animation could look like, moving us past our storyboard/script phase. It looks good, and further discussions will take place over the long weekend to see what changes need to be made; maybe more of a story focus, rather than just an info drop. It's meant to be rather short, at two to three minutes, so I'm not sure how much we need to pack into that time. What I'm also working around right now is the endgame for the project.  I'm basically answering the question: If it's successful and the TV spot lets thousands of Houstonians know about it,where do we go from there? Would we pitch the idea to Memorial Hermann, with the prospect of them providing money for our future efforts? Or, would we use the support garnered from the TV spot to form our own business (likely through crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, etc)? I'm still deciding. And I'll be asking the other members of the team for their opinions on it, as well. It's great to get caught up in the moment with this project, but seeing the (possible) big picture isn't always a bad thing.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Schedule Update and 3/18/16

Schedule Update

And just like that, spring break is over. Going forward, the next two weeks will represent an interesting shift in the frequency of my blog posts; I have the promising opportunity to work on the project animation for 14 days, uninterrupted. That sounds like I'm skipping class, but it couldn't be further from the truth- it is my class. My school hosts a series of two-week classes at the end of March leading into April, which is known as A-term. I decided to do my own, as the opportunity here is too great to miss out on. As the project is already underway, getting it off the ground and forming a concrete base of work is already done with. The storyboard has almost been completed, and we're moving into the contact phase. I'll be reaching out to animation studios for quotes/estimates based on what we want out of the project, mostly playing it by ear- Dr. Nguyen might want certain things out of this development stage, and some new ideas might be brought into the fray. I'll be giving out updates and pieces of information pertaining to the project over the next two weeks. Stay tuned.

3/18/16

Because of the importance of the project, most of my internship visits as of late have been rather short, and today was no exception. I shadowed Dr. Nguyen's post-op patient visits in the ICU, which I haven't really talked about yet- I think I've mentioned them in passing, but I've never really detailed what goes on there. It's not really comparable to any other part of my time at the hospital, as seeing post-op patients is definitely more emotional than watching a surgery or discussing their heart conditions in valve conference. Sometimes the patient is close to death, and I see a snapshot of that when I walk into the room. Other times they're doing very well, surrounded by family members who love them and can't wait until they fully recover. The latter example is (thankfully) the much more common one, but I think there's something to be learned from both.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

3/4/16

             Today I met with Dr. Nguyen around 1:00 pm, with no idea what we'd be doing- but, he told me to wear my scrubs. I didn't end up using them to enter the OR or anything, which is good because I wanted to dedicate this blog post to our project. Things worked out! After luckily running into Dr. Nguyen in the hallways of the cardiovascular ICU on the 8th floor, I went with him to go deal with a patient's incision drainage- not the best thing to see after lunch. A few sutures later, we were on our way to his office for a short meeting about the project. I went over what "the project" is in my Feb. 12th blog post, but I'll review it again here: it's the seed for a greater effort to introduce layman audiences to complicated heart diseases, and uses simple animation as a means of conveying information. I've been thinking of naming it "(insert heart condition):What's Going On?," but that's tentative. We've crafted a story around it, and will be using that story to bring in viewership and ensure a degree of entertainment. Length-wise, it's aimed at around five minutes; keeping it short is part of the accessibility. People are busy, and if they have a loved one dealing with a heart condition, they won't want to sit down for a thirty-minute lecture on the intricacies of that condition. They need the basics, and that's exactly what we hope to deliver.

        The first animation we're working on is about aortic stenosis, the tightening of the aortic valve. The animation has been through a full storyboard draft, and the topic of discussion today was how we'd be moving forward with it. We both decided that pushing it through another draft would be necessary, as refined work is what we both want to see- from the visuals to the dialogue. Dr. Nguyen revealed a potential TV opportunity for it in the near future, which, if used, could really get the entire project on its feet. I'm hopeful that connections can be made through that opportunity, but first we've got to create something that's polished and worth people's time. Saying this makes me sound like a stereotypical teenager, but there are some holes to be filled in Memorial Hermann's social media presence. Their Youtube channel is full of anecdotal cases and recovery stories, which- while impactful- don't deliver overarching information. Every case is different, and although they might give prospective patients something to identify with, it's not contributing to their education about diseases. I definitely appreciate Memorial Hermann's efforts there, but it's just a source of encouraging entertainment. Pulling through with a decent idea about heart disease education is a service not just to future patients, but to the hospital's standing in the tech-savvy world we live in. People want to learn, and with the internet making it easier than ever, What's Going On? has incredible potential.