Gout isn’t just painful, it’s dangerous if crystals build up in vital organs. However, nephrologists and rheumatologists tend to underestimate the pain and 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 using a traditional animation studio, we leveraged AI to visualize patient quotes and uric acid buildup in organs. We used social listening to find real patient quotes about the visceral pain of gout and paired it with unique art styles to bring this disease, and the patients it impacts, to life with maximum emotional resonance.

The main rendering tool was the open-source Deforum Stable Diffusion notebook on the Google Collaboratory research tool. To accomplish the technical feat of producing the films, we developed a production workflow and in-house team of prompt engineers, machine learning experts, creative technologists, and mathematicians.

Dozens of prompts were engineered to generate 1000 frames per film, each rendered as an individual image based on a combination of text prompt and previous frame.

Spatial differences in the physical relationship between frames created the appearance of zooms, pans, and XYZ axis rotation, with mathematical functions dictating camera behavior—like a flipbook for the 21st century.

Dozens of parameters were programmed, then frames were rendered, reviewed, revised, and the entire process repeated. Each film required about 50 runs to achieve the final product, which took roughly 2-3 weeks.

The soundtrack was designed second-by-second, with immersive 3D sound bringing to life the film’s visceral nature.

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 on the site was an unprecedented 4 minutes. And most surprisingly, over 20% of viewers revisited the site again, to rewatch the videos and re-immerse themselves in the world of uncontrolled gout.