Working with Dr Victoria Bates, Associate Professor in Modern Medical History at the University of Bristol, we have created three short animations exploring hospital spaces and design choices within the NHS.

The first film of the triptych was released in 2022, titled These Sounds Save Lives, an animation painted entirely by hand in virtual reality (VR) using Oculus Quill. The minimalist, stripped back, duotone aesthetic puts the focus on the soundscape, whilst the 360º first-person perspective enabled us to deploy spatial sound design.

A visit to hospital can be a uncomfortable experience and noise is often a source of complaints. Over the years, the NHS has spent significant amounts of money on things like sound-proofing and internal communications campaigns to try and reduce noise within the hospital, but as our film makes clear – silence is never the goal.

Our aim was to reframe how we hear and listen within hospitals, perhaps to even help us cope in future moments of distress or anxiety. Through the calmness of Victoria’s narration, we call for compassion, patience and understanding – encouraging an appreciation for the people that make our NHS tick.

For the second piece, our starting point was a series of audio interviews Victoria had conducted with consultants, practitioners, arts co-ordinators, interior designers and hospital architects. The research combined 600 minutes of audio, from 25 interviews across 12 NHS Trusts – and samples were taken to craft the narration.

We asked if good design could make a difference to the way hospitals work, care and save people every day.

The visual aesthetic was derived from designers moodboards — layering photography, type, material swatches, sketches and annotations to create an animation that is part scrapbook, part slide-show.

The end call-to-action targets hospital commissioners, asking them to invest in design and care for these spaces.

Our most recent animation is another experimental and experiential piece, designed to strip back the visual to allow the viewer to focus on one aspect – colour.

We ran particle simulations of over 7.5 million colourful dots, moving organically to create ambient visuals that are suggestive of hospital spaces through the eras. The end result is more like a memory or a moving painting, evoking a sense of these evolving spaces.