Twenty seconds on a GP waiting room screen, with the sound off
A twenty second cholesterol awareness animation built to run silently on GP waiting room screens, produced to a locked brand specification.
- Client
- Benecol, Raisio Group
- Turnaround
- Final version delivered September 2026
- Service
- Patient education animation
- Delivered
- Twenty second animation, vertical format for screens · Built to run silently with no voiceover · Typography and colour to the approved brand system · Delivered within a fixed twenty second total including fades
The brief
Benecol wanted a short patient education animation about high cholesterol, to play on screens in GP waiting rooms.
Two constraints shaped everything. It had to work with the sound off, because waiting room screens are silent. And it had to run to twenty seconds flat, including every fade and the end frame.
Designing for silence
A film with no voiceover has to carry its whole argument on screen. That changes the writing as much as the design: every line has to be short enough to read at a glance and sit on screen long enough to finish reading, while still leaving room for the next one.
Twenty seconds is not much. It works out at a handful of statements, so each one has to earn its place. Anything decorative is time taken from something a patient needs to read.
A brand system with no give in it
This was the strictest specification we have worked to. Named typefaces with no substitutions permitted anywhere in the film, including the small print and the final frame. Specific weights for titles, subheadings and body. Line spacing held between 120 and 140 percent of the font size. Neutral tracking, with kerning adjusted by hand where pairs looked uneven.
Colour was limited to four approved values and nothing else, with one of them reserved for short emphasis only rather than general use.
None of that is unreasonable for a healthcare brand. Consistency is part of how a patient recognises the information as coming from a real source rather than an advert. But it does mean there is nowhere to improvise, and every frame gets checked against the guidelines rather than against taste.
Getting it exactly right
The final round came back with a short document of corrections: a missing space in a compound phrase, a line of copy that needed to read exactly as written rather than approximately, and a word running outside the safe area at the bottom of frame.
Those are the kind of notes that look small and matter enormously on a screen a patient is reading at distance. Each one was applied and the whole film re-checked against the brand system rather than just the three flagged frames.
What it demonstrates
Healthcare communication is a category where the discipline matters more than the flourish. This one was about working inside somebody else’s rules precisely, to the second, and making the information land anyway.