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THE PHARMACY, 2010
This was a commission for the Churchill hospital in
Oxford. The pharmacy had just installed a robot picking system, and they
wanted a silent film of it in the waiting room. The pharmacy workers were
keen that it should show all the stages of the dispensing process, both to
show their elaborate procedures to be completely sure they don’t give
anyone the wrong drug and to explain why patients usually have to wait 30
minutes. The lengthy waiting times are obviously a sensitive topic!
Watching the robot pick the drug packets reminded me of the scene from Toy
Story where an arcade crane machine picks up a delighted alien saying ‘I
have been chosen’. I contacted Gary Alexander who was enthusiastic about
the job and we gradually put a script together.
Most of the footage was filmed by Gary using his
Canon 5d. Meg, my wife, starred as the patient. An engineer from the robot
company helped us fix an action camera for the drug packet’s point of
view. After a couple of days filming in the pharmacy, they gave us some
empty packets to make a model in my workshop for filming the stop frame
animation of the packet faces. Gary did the editing and added the 3d
computer animation of the pill at the end of the film. We delivered the
final film and they were polite about it. I was busy with other work and
forgot to add anything about it to my website. But it recently resurfaced
and made me laugh.
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