For an exhibition about medical imaging technologies, I created a cluster of experiences about mammography and other breast imaging techniques. The exhibition included a series of Patient Stories. For each Patient Story, I recorded an interview with the patient, selected images to represent their story, and selected audio clips from the interview to accompany the images.

More About the Process

The goal in including these stories in the exhibit was to bring a more personal, human element to the topic. It was important to link the personal element to the science/medical content. We decided to share the patient stories as audio of personal interviews accompanied by visuals of the patients’ medical images.

I began by working with our external content expert, a radiologist, to identify potential patients to interview, and to work out the process of obtaining usable images. The patients had to get the copies of the images themselves, and then give the images to us, and I had to obtain radiology software in order to be able to view the raw images and convert them to a format that could be used in a video.

Based on the content research I had completed and on preliminary conversations with the three selected patients, I developed a list of interview questions. I interviewed each patient, and our audio tech recorded the interviews. Then, each interview was transcribed. 

I wrote a script for each Patient Story using content from the audio recordings. As I selected with audio clips to use and how to order them, I considered what visual resources we had available, in the form of the patient medical images, and what other on-screen graphics would be needed. I provided our audio editor with a script that included the patients’ words and the corresponding time codes from the recordings.

Once the audio editor had assemble the audio track, I wrote a three-column script for our tech designer, describing the audio, images, and on-screen text. I reviewed the designer’s rough cut and gave feedback on the timing of the images and the captions. The tech designer then produced the final video file.