In this animated ad for Capella University’s nursing program, layered graphics made from photographs are used and animated in a quite visually pleasing way. The only problem is, aside from the main character nurse, everyone and everything else is completely covered in a bloody red color, and this is supposed to be a hospital as the background (!). The commercial establishes why they use this color scheme of scarlet and white (or, at least I think this is why: it is the school’s colors, apparently, as the spot opens with the school’s coat of arms in this color scheme), but as the color scheme for a hospital and for nurses, I think the color choice couldn’t be much worse, with white being the color of a doctor’s or a nurse’s lab coat, and red being the color of blood.
Many people are afraid of hospitals, and we’ve all seen the Hammer Frankenstein movies where people in white lab coats get blood smeared all over them. I would expect this blood-red color to affect people on a subliminal level in all the wrong ways, making everything look completely blood-soaked, and it would serve to remind easily grossed-out prospective nurses who can’t stand the sight of blood exactly why they shouldn’t go into nursing. (Although, maybe this is by design: if you can’t stand a little blood, then you’d be wasting everyone’s time if you trained to be a nurse!) And it’s a shame that this color scheme is so inappropriate for the subject matter, because otherwise it’s a beautiful-looking spot advertising for an education program for nurses: a career path we very much need people to follow, as good nurses are badly needed in our healthcare system today!
But fear not, for fixing this spot would be a cinch: simply replace the reds in the hospital-type setting with light blue for an appropriate healthcare environment that appears clean, calm, safe, and sterile, and everything else can stay the same. Then just re-render it out again, and presto: perfect! It shouldn’t take much time at all to change it, assuming the company that made it still has all the digital files. I hope they will make this small alteration and replace the ad they’re running now with a new version using light blue as the background color, as it would be far more befitting for the message they’re sending. And while some might say that this color scheme issue is not such a big deal, with the colors they’re using, it really kinda is.
Here’s the blood-soaked spot:
