OHNC: Video: “Cerebral Palsy and the Brain-Injured Child”

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Introduction: OHNC, Dr. Neubauer and HBOT

Neubauer2The Ocean Hyperbaric Neurologic Center (OHNC) was a South Florida medical facility that used hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) to treat severe neurological injuries, such as Cerebral Palsy, birth defects, near-drownings, stroke, and traumas.

Richard Neubauer M.D. (1922-2007), who founded the OHNC and acted as its Medical Director for thirty-five years, is considered the “father” of HBOT for neurological rehabilitation.  He earned a worldwide reputation for integrity and scientific rigor, and is the author of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy.

Here is an excellent ten minute video introduction to Dr. Neubauer and his pioneering use of HBOT, “The Recoverable Brain” (Parts 2 & 3 are located here and here).

Project background

This project involved:

  • Completely reconstructing OHNC’s patient documentary videos – which it acknowledged were in terrible shape, due to a series of internal problems.
  • Establishing new procedures for shooting, logging and storing new footage, to ensure these problems could never be repeated.

To understand the massive effort that was required to reconstruct these videos – and why even the finished product, which I produced, still looks fairly amateurish by professional standards – requires a bit of an explanation.

The terrible state of OHNC’s pediatric case study documentary videos

One of the means by which the OHNC marketed itself was through documentary (or “case study”) videos, showing patients’ statuses before, during and after HBOT.

To put it bluntly, the videotape that OHNC was distributing containing case studies of its pediatric neurorehabilitation work was in terrible shape. Dr. Neubauer only belatedly discovered this fact, after being alerted to it by some of the physicians and scientists around the world, to whom his staff had forwarded the videos.  As he was traveling so much at the time, Dr. Neubauer had little control over the production of these videos, and entrusted their development to his Director of Marketing & PR (who was fired after what you’re about to read was discovered).

Prior to this, Dr. Neubauer had retained me to work on some other media related tasks, and was thrilled with the result of my:

Development of a logo icon to represent the scientific acronym for hyperbaric oxygen: “HBO2″.

HBO2large

Development of a graphic identity for “Neuro2,” a first-ever international symposium that Dr. Neubauer was organizing on HBOT for neurorehabilitation.

Redesigning and rewriting, on a rush-basis, a print ad for another OHNC symposium on pediatric neurorehabilitation.

Based on these successes, Dr. Neubauer retained me to evaluate OHNC’s case study videos, and make recommendations for improvement.

My evaluation of, and recommendations regarding OHNC’s case study videos

My major findings included:

  • The raw footage was being shot on several consumer-level 8mm cameras by a resident HBOT technician with no experience in video production or graphics, and was extremely amateurish (jerkiness, purposeless zooms & pans, etc.).
  • This technician then “produced” and duplicated the finished videos on a VHS to VHS makeshift “editing” system, with severely pixellated “titles” being generated on a low-end graphics program (see an example of the technician’s design ability here).
  • The videos suffered from severe color problems (skin tones were shades of green; the whites of peoples’ eyes were shades of red, etc.), in part because of no color balancing, and the fact that the master tapes were being stored in open boxes, with no protection against the South Florida humidity and salty air.
  • The final videos appeared extremely amateurish, and it was only after the first round of them were distributed that Dr. Neubauer began receiving negative reports on them from physician colleagues around the world.

My recommendations to Dr. Neubauer were:

(1) To immediately stop distributing any of the existing videos

(2) To destroy all copies in their possession

(3) To retain me (or another professional) to:

    • Review, label and log all scenes on all raw videos.
    • Identify the best scenes and stitch them together into sequences.
    • Take all the raw videos to a professional video processing facility, where the targeted sequences can be stabilized (from jerkiness) and color corrected.
    • Create a bright, clean, standardized graphic standard for presenting key information about each video that the viewer is about to see.

Dr. Neubauer concurred with my evaluation and recommendations, and retained me to execute these tasks.

The work required approximately six months of my time, and a small fortune on the OHNC’s part, but as is indicated below, Dr. Neubauer was thrilled with the end result.

The result: A video that Dr. Neubauer was thrilled with, and a system put in place that prevented these problems from ever reoccurring

The result of all this work was the video, “Cerebral Palsy and the Brain-Injured Child,” the first 8:00 of which is comprised of the case studies that I recreated for Dr. Neubauer.

The following is an excerpt of the letter of recommendation that Dr. Neubauer wrote for me, shortly before I relocated from South Florida to Charlottesville, VA.  It also references a major follow-up project I did for him – to deconstruct, rewrite and redesign the OHNC’s entire website, which suffered from a similar array of problems:

“When I retained Jon, I had high hopes, but no expectations. Until that time, OHNC had been ill-served by its public relations and creative/media consultants. […]

“Jon has proven to be a multi-talented, exceptionally valuable asset to OHNC. Jon’s work… required that he research, analyze, deconstruct, then reconstruct OHNC’s existing media, and consult on overall strategies – and even business operations, down to the smallest detail. In all of the above work realms, Jon has performed exceptionally well, and the results became apparent soon after our affiliation began. Our business has increased significantly, and we are much better organized.

OHNC has received compliments from all over the world regarding the media that Jon reconstructed (particularly our videos and website).” […]

– Richard A. Neubauer, M.D., Medical Director, Ocean Hyperbaric-Neurologic Center, December 14, 2002

“Cerebral Palsy and the Brain-Injured Child” video

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