As the Creative Designer at the Brigham Research Institute at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I have worked on an event for the Cambridge Science Festival every year since 2012. Each year, we have done a similar type of event, with most years involving some sort of series of talks or interviews with researchers, but in 2021, we decided to do something a little different.
In 2021, we worked with a lab working on COVID diagnostic test research to do a video tour of the lab and interviews with the researchers and the research assistants. This was a virtual event where we featured a look inside a laboratory at the hospital. There were two components to this event – a virtual tour of the lab with some footage shot live as well as pre-recorded segments. I helped storyboard the video, shot and edited all of the footage (on my iPhone) and then also was the live camera on the day of the event. There were a few animation and illustration components for the video and I created those as well, working with one of my Northeastern University co-op students on all of these parts.
The event was also somewhat unusual because it was geared towards a younger audience. One of the best parts of the Cambridge Science Festival is how it aims to make science accessible to people of all ages. Our audience was made up of people of all ages, but there were a large number of questions from children in the (virtual) audience.
