Gout isn’t just painful, it’s dangerous if crystals build up in vital organs. However, doctors tend to underestimate the pain and often don’t realize the urgency to treat. How could we break through to doctors with emotionally and medically resonant messages on a tight timeline and with almost no budget?

Our objective was to bring to life the content in a way that had never been done before—and do it quickly and inexpensively. Instead of a traditional animation studio, we leveraged AI to visualize real patient experiences and the damage of uric acid to organs.

To enhance the viewing experience, we developed a first-of-its-kind “digital flipbook” UI for mobile viewing, with playback speed, direction, audio, and haptics all driven by the thumbscroll gesture.

This mobile experience was part of a larger campaign including a desktop microsite with videos featuring 3D immersive sound, PR, digital display, email, and print drivers.

With The Outside In Experiment, we sought to visualize both the pain and systemic consequences of gout for the first time

Through social listening we found visceral descriptions of gout pain in vivid terms—hornets, electricity, barbed wire. Using AI capabilities to turn text into images, we then fed those patient quotes into the image generator, alongside physician descriptions of the anatomical implications of uncontrolled gout.

We developed a bespoke in-house workflow to generate 1,000-frame animations frame by frame. We created three original mobile films, delivered in a first-of-its-kind “digital flipbook” UI for mobile viewers.

Outside In Experiment combines social listening with medical knowledge, prompt engineering, and experimental animation tools to bring to life the realities of gout for physicians in a way they have never seen before.

The result is a series of mobile films as unsettling as the disease itself.

People suffering from gout know well that it is one of the most painful conditions in the world. However, this pain is often dismissed as “just gout” by those who haven’t experienced it, including physicians. At the same time, gout isn’t taken seriously as a systemic disease even though uric acid crystals can build up in vital organs and cause serious comorbidities.

When doctors are just given this information, they tend to downplay it or dismiss it as something they already know. We had to find a way to get to their emotions, to make them feel uncomfortable, disturbed, and unsure, just like patients do. The approach had to be viscerally moving while simultaneously educational. The innovative AI approach garners interest while the content of the films educates, and the combination of the vivid imagery and the immersive sound brings the doctors into the strange, terrifying world of uncontrolled gout.

Using AI-generated imagery and experimental animation tools helped maximize efficiency, producing three mobile “films” over the course of four weeks on a low budget.

Each film frame was rendered as an individual image, based on a combination of the text prompt and the previous frame. Spatial differences in the physical relationship between frames create the appearance of camera movement, with mathematical functions dictating camera behavior. Unique artistic styles were chosen to parallel the way patients described their pain.

To enhance the mobile experience, we developed a first-of-its-kind, gesture-based, multisensory mobile viewing technique we call “Digital Flipbook” UI.

“Digital Flipbook” leverages the thumbscroll gesture and allows users to scrub through the frames with frame rate and direction driven by the user, with a synched audio track and haptic response—one vibration per frame—for Android users.

Digital display and print ads with QR codes challenged mobile users to explore further.

Despite having almost no budget and very little time to produce the bulk of the work before the end of the fiscal year, the results were astounding. Among busy rheumatologists and nephrologists, we achieved a 16% email click-through rate. The average time spent interacting with the “Digital Flipbook” was an unprecedented four minutes. And most surprisingly, over 20% of viewers revisited the experience again to rewatch the videos and reimmerse themselves in the world of uncontrolled gout.