Part 1: 
An Awstruck Audience

An Awstruck Audience

“The audience reaction was amazing,” reports David Örtoft, technical producer and co-author of the films (and a medical student at Karolinska). “It was a mixture of shouting and awed silence. During the stem cell sequence, one of our professors was standing before the audience in front of the screen and it looked like the cells were growing and dividing all around him. The illusion was very convincing.”

Since that presentation, David, and colleague Hanna Reuterborg, have been asked to do postproduction on a film by award winning photographer Dr. Lennart Nilsson and have received numerous requests to demonstrate this visualization technology at medical meetings and conferences. And all of this while the pair continue with their medical studies …

Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all is that neither David nor Hanna have any formal background in 3D animation, never mind the complexities of dual-stream stereoscopic projection technologies. “We were not stereoscopic people,” says Hanna with a note of astonishment at where they now find themselves.

Two Paths to Karolinska

David grew up in Norrkoping, two hours drive south of Stockholm. As a child he played keyboards and began experimenting with his PC at the age of six, an experience he now credits with making him “comfortable with this type of technology.” As the end of high school drew near he considered two avenues of study: technology or medicine. He liked technology but after visiting prospective universities found that he “felt much more at home with medical people.” However life sometimes has a strange way of balancing things out.

Hanna is the artist on the team. She grew up in Stockholm and always loved art. This led her on a journey of discovery first through architecture and then illustration and design. During her art studies her sense of the innate beauty of the human form, combined with a growing curiosity about how the body works led her to medical school. She started there in 1998, the same year that David began.

Hanna Reuterborg
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David Örtoft (left)
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Next: An Idea Takes Shape