MI:RNA Diagnostics is a veterinary diagnostics company built on a biomarker most people outside the field have never heard of. They asked us to refresh their overview film and make it carry the impact of the technology, with a strong hook inside the first 10 to 20 seconds and a structure that could be broken back down into snippets.
The audience was the hard part. The film had to work for veterinarians and farmers, who want to know what it changes in clinic or on farm, and at the same time for animal health companies, investors and academic partners, who want to know the science holds. Those 2 groups do not respond to the same footage.
2 people were named to carry it, and both are founders. Dr. Eve Hanks is CEO and Founder, a veterinary surgeon with 13 years in clinic who had the idea while working as a clinical pathologist for a university in Scotland. Dr. Robert Coultous is CSO and Co-Founder, a veterinary surgeon who also keeps animals, which meant his farm could be both a location and a reason to be there.
The schedule gave us a single day and 2 places with nothing in common, so we built it around light rather than convenience. Call was 05:30, with minimal kit out of the cases, because the only thing that mattered in the first hour was being ready when the sun came up.
The morning went to the farm. Aerial establishers over the fields and the steading, then Robert feeding and handling animals, close on the faces of the cattle and on his hands doing the work, then his interview once the light had settled. We shot him in the cattle shed with the pens and the straw behind him rather than against a neutral wall, because the point of having a founder who farms is that you can see he farms.
The afternoon went to the other half of the company. Eve's interview, then b-roll through reception, the bench, the analysers, sample racks and the diagnostic process itself. 2 interviews, 2 teardowns and a drive between them, all inside 1 scheduled day from 05:30 to 16:30.
The whole day ran on 1 operator. Chris McElwee travelled to Scotland and shot all of it himself, the aerials, both interviews and every frame of b-roll on the farm and in the lab.
The film runs 3:51 and opens exactly where the brief asked it to. Over an aerial of sheep on a Scottish hillside and a walk down a farm track with a dog, Eve says the entire proposition in 1 sentence before a title has arrived.
From there it alternates. Eve carries the origin, the reach and the ambition: 2 laboratories, 1 in Dundee and 1 in Athens, Georgia, and people in 10 countries. Robert carries the mechanism: relative expression profiling of microRNA, a fingerprint of expression, then machine learning and predictive classification to diagnose disease, predict its progression and predict treatment response.
The animals do the rest of the work. Cattle in the field and in the pens under the herd management argument for Johne's disease and bovine tuberculosis. A cat and a kitten on a kitchen floor, a dog on a consulting table, under heart disease, kidney disease, cancer and osteoarthritis. Every claim in the voice track has something in front of it.
It closes where it started, on the farm in low golden light, then the MI:RNA mark and a single line: revolutionising early diagnosis in animals.
Dr. Robert Coultous and Dr. Eve Hanks at the wall · MI:RNA overview film · Scotland
Dr. Robert Coultous, CSO and Co-Founder, interviewed where he works
Pipetting at the bench · the afternoon half of the day
I'm Dr. Eve Hanks, I'm a veterinarian and I believe that MI:RNA, a company that I founded six years ago, has the power to change and revolutionise diagnostics forever.
