Commissioned & events

GlowBrain - Night when brains are glowing

2013 · science outreach event and media dissemination package · event project

GlowBrain translates EU neuroscience research into public events and multimedia storytelling programs.

GlowBrain pretvara europsko istraživanje neuroznanosti u javne događaje i višemedijsko pripovijedanje.

GlowBrain - Night when brains are glowing — production still

This project credentials: Cross-media & events · Corporate event production

Notes from the producer

I like GlowBrain because it is the clearest case I have of what I actually do. A laboratory had a real and almost un-tellable innovation — stem cells made to glow so they can be followed inside a living brain — and a European grant that quietly assumed the science would explain itself. It never does. My job was to build the machine that carries it to people who will never read the paper: the visual identity, the bilingual posts that turn biomaterials and in vivo imaging into something you can grasp in thirty seconds, and finally a single evening where a stroke-repair project could be experienced instead of merely attended.

We put the Night When Brains Glow into Lauba on 20 September 2013, on the project's first anniversary, and I ran it as a production rather than a symposium — entry flow, projections, a Massimo Savić performance, and a crowdfunding desk sitting in the middle of the room instead of apologising from a corner. I am honest about the loose ends: from what survives I can't prove the final crowdfunding figure or the total media reach. What I will stand behind is the method. If you want specialist research to matter in public, you design the story and the staging as seriously as the budget lines — which, for the record, we revised three times before we were satisfied.

— Matija Radeljak

The story

When the European Union approved GlowBrain in October 2012 — a €3.7 million FP7 grant, ID 316120, to combine stem cells and biomaterials for brain repair — almost all of the money and the prestige sat inside a laboratory. The project was coordinated by Professor Srećko Gajović at the University of Zagreb School of Medicine, with seven partner institutions across Europe, and it was built to modernise research equipment, train young scientists, and push a genuinely hard innovation: marking stem cells with bioluminescence so their behaviour could be tracked in the brain of a living mouse. None of that is easy to explain to the public that paid for it.

That translation problem was our brief. We treated public engagement as part of the delivery, not decoration bolted on at the end. From late 2012 the project already spoke in two registers — an English narration draft, twin Croatian and English promo masters — and by 2013 it had a language of its own: an orange-and-grey system of circular motifs, a single logomark, and one repeated promise, "unlocking the potential of brain research." Stem-cell differentiation, in vivo imaging, biomaterials — each became a short, teachable unit in both languages, with countdown visuals, question-and-answer cards, and researcher profiles that gave the science a human face before anyone was asked to show up.

The whole campaign pointed at one night. On 20 September 2013 we staged Noć kad mozgovi svijetle — the Night When Brains Glow — at Lauba in Zagreb, framed as the project's first-anniversary public activation. It was engineered as an experience rather than a lecture: timed entry, information points, projection moments, a staged transition into talks and a performance by Massimo Savić, with branded entry panels and a crowdfunding desk built directly into the flow of the room. Behind it was a real production stack — contracted producing, directing, animation and sound — and a budget that moved through several disciplined revisions (274,555.31, then 236,033.87, then 246,951.48 HRK) around a stable backbone of honoraria, scenography, technical equipment and digital fundraising.

Afterwards the communication kept working: versioned video outputs, a documented press window across September into early October, and measurable growth on the project's own channels. Not everything closed cleanly — the final crowdfunding total and the exact media reach are not conclusively pinned down in the records — but the core result held. A €3.7 million biomedical infrastructure project reached a general audience because narrative, design and public staging were treated as core infrastructure from day one.

This is the kind of work we mean when we say we produce science communication and cross-media campaigns: take something invisible and specialist — a glowing cell in a mouse's brain — and build the identity, the bilingual content, the event and the fundraising around it, so the public can actually meet it.

Milestones

2012-10 — EU FP7 grant 316120 approved — €3.7M to combine stem cells and biomaterials for brain repair, coordinated by Prof. Srećko Gajović (University of Zagreb School of Medicine) with 7 European partners.
2013-09-20 — Noć kad mozgovi svijetle (Night When Brains Glow) — public activation at Lauba, Zagreb, with a performance by Massimo Savić.
2016-02 — Final FP7 project presentation and the book "GlowBrain — Unlocking the Potential of Brain Research".

Outcomes

Bilingual (HR/EN) science-communication package — identity system, teachable social units, live event and versioned video outputs
+206 active Facebook followers — across the two-phase PR window, Sep–Oct 2013
Public activation of an EU FP7 research project — the Night When Brains Glow at Lauba, framed as the first-anniversary milestone

Credits

Prof. Srećko Gajović — Scientific lead / FP7 project coordinator (University of Zagreb School of Medicine)
Aning Film — Science communication, visual identity & public event production
Massimo Savić — Live performance, Night When Brains Glow