Category: Rare Sightings, LLC

Our Approach to Science Videos

Most company videos feel exactly like what they are — scripted, stiff, and built for a brand rather than a team on a mission!

Rare Sightings does something different. We uncover the human story from the founders, physicians, and researchers doing the work. Then we lead them through a filmmaking process so they tell it naturally. Guided questions, not a teleprompter. Documentary editing, not a polished performance. The result feels honest, moves quickly, and holds attention.

We’ve also structured it as a bulk-rate program for trade associations, incubators, accelerators, and VC portfolio groups — so the companies that need it most can actually afford it.

What You Get

• Story identification and format selection
• Pre-production: narrative map, interview questions, slide design
• Professional on-location shoot — we come to you
• Multi-angle documentary-style interview capture
• Custom-designed slides with key data and claims
• Stock footage and licensed music
• Existing product materials and investor assets integrated as needed
• Edit, color correction, sound mix
• Frame.io collaborative platform — review, comment, and share without downloading

How It Works

• The association emails its members an invitation to a Zoom call
• Interested companies join a group call — we show examples, answer questions
• Participating companies upload existing materials to a secure share drive
• Rare Sightings prepares a working script 
• Details of the shoot are discussed in a pre-production call to shape their story
• Shoot day: one central location plus additional settings for visual variety
• Each interview runs approximately one hour
• Rough cut delivered via Frame.io for team review, comments, and approvals
• One round of revisions, then final delivery

Story Types

• Founder Story
• Problem / Solution
• Reasons to Invest
• Physician / PI Perspective
• Patient Advocacy
• Company Overview

Pricing

Comparable production costs for a 2–3-minute finished video are $ 2,500 per video. By packaging this production for a minimum of six companies, our price is $1,500 per company.

Recent Package for SPARC Health Incubator / Park City Angels

Watch the full collection → https://f.io/u68BxtiO

Who We’ve Done This For

• SPARC Health Incubator / Park City Angels
• BioUtah Trade Association
• 1871 Chicago Tech Incubator
• Biotech Showcase
• Zach’s Small Cap Research

QUOTES

“Terrific to work with — professional in every way, and really expert at navigating many different types of companies and getting their personalities across.” — Kelvyn Cullimore, CEO, BioUtah

“The stories really nailed the nuances of the business, the problems they were trying to solve, and most importantly, the people — and it all came together in a way that felt natural and compelling.” — Alex Wallberg, General Manager SPARC Health, Operations Manager Park City Angels, and Co-Founder, SPARC Labs. 

“Rare Sightings has a unique ability to just get in and get things done using modern techniques and traditional filmmaking craftsmanship.” — John Geletka, Founder, G+ and Mentor, 1871 Tech Incubator, Chicago

We appreciate the effort that went into capturing both the science and the human side of Freyya, and we’re excited to share this with potential investors and partners. —-Gabriele G. Niederauer, PhD, FAIMBE, CEO and Co-Founder, FREYYA, San Antonio

Let’s talk about this opportunity for your member companies. 

Thanks! Jeff Walker, Managing Partner,  Rare Sightings LLC 

Jeff@rare-sightings.com

312-286-9934

Some partnerships start narrow and grow into something larger. Ours with SPARC Health is one of them.

Content Carnivores helped develop the SPARC Health name and brand identity when the organization was a new initiative looking to consolidate Utah’s healthcare innovation ecosystem under a single banner. The acronym we landed on — Startup Platform for Advice, Resources, and Community — gave the org a clear identity and a usable shorthand. SPARC has since grown into a full-fledged accelerator, affiliated with Park City Angels, BioUtah, BioHive, and the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, supporting cohorts of early-stage companies in medical devices, diagnostics, and biotech.

Several cohorts in, SPARC came back with a new question: their founders had real stories — credible technology, real clinical traction, compelling personal arcs — but no consistent way to tell those stories on video. Pitch decks and stage reps weren’t enough. SPARC wanted something more durable. Something a founder could send before an investor meeting, embed on a website, share on LinkedIn, or hand to a prospective partner.

We knew exactly who to bring in.

Enter Rare Sightings

Content Carnivores has now partnered exclusively with Rare Sightings, LLC, the Chicago / Los Angeles / Park City–based production company with twenty-plus years of experience producing video for clients ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 brands. Documentary sensibility, deep healthcare and life sciences specialization, and a modern production pipeline made them the obvious choice for cohort-scale founder storytelling.

Rare Sightings built the program specifically for this kind of engagement, and SPARC became the proof-of-concept that’s now the foundation of their BIO 2026 and trade association offering.

View the videos from this project here: https://f.io/u68BxtiO

Twelve Videos, One Cohort

The program produced twelve videos across the SPARC cohort. Among the founders featured:

• DigiBeat (Cliff Steele) — a digital cardiac stethoscope with an AR overlay for clinician training and earlier detection
• RefloDx (Greg Critchfield, MD) — SondeFlux, a wearable ultrasound patch designed to replace invasive testing for silent reflux (LPR)
• Diagnostic Ventures (Brian Bentley) — a rapid blood pathogen identification platform built on spinning disk and Raman spectroscopy, on the FDA Breakthrough pathway
• Apex Monitoring Systems — NeoPulse, a neonatal vital-signs harness
• Freyya (Gabi Niederauer) — pelvic health innovation

Some companies received a single founder overview. Others received two — typically a general-audience explainer paired with an investor cut, or a brand film paired with live pitch capture from SPARC’s Entrepreneur & Investor Summit. Same source interviews, different editorial logic, different audiences.

The Process

The program ran on a simple, repeatable workflow that the team has since formalized into the broader bulk-rate offering available to trade associations, accelerators, and VC portfolios at BIO 2026 and beyond:

Intake. Each company received a dedicated Google Drive folder. Founders uploaded what they already had — pitch decks, product photography, news coverage, prior video, URLs to reference content — into a structured intake document. No email-thread chaos, no missed assets, all approved material in one place.

Scripting. Documentary-style guided questions rather than scripted line reads. The goal was natural delivery from the founder — moments of real conviction, not a performance. The same source interview could produce both a tight investor cut (sharp, fact-driven, fast) and a warmer general-audience overview, with strict voice discipline about who speaks what and why.

Production. Two cameras, professional lighting, lav audio, sound mixer where dialogue mattered. Some interviews ran at SPARC’s Entrepreneur & Investor Summit — capturing on-stage pitches, backstage interviews, and crowd reactions as they happened. Others ran in studio with controlled time slots, batched across a small number of production days to keep per-video cost down.

Post. Footage ran through Rare Sightings’ AI-assisted editorial pipeline — automated transcription, segment scoring on signals like emotional peaks and confident takes, and a Final Cut Pro timeline assembled in advance so the editor could focus on shaping the story rather than scrubbing for the good moments.

Review. All review and approval happened in Frame.io. Founders, SPARC leadership, and the production team could leave timestamped comments directly on the cut. No PDFs of feedback. No version confusion. The link travels.

Delivery. Each company received their finished videos in formats suited for web, social, investor portal, and broadcast where applicable. SPARC received a full cohort reel that doubles as a sponsorship and recruitment asset for future cohorts.

“The stories really nailed the nuances of the business, the problems they were trying to solve, and most importantly, the people — and it all came together in a way that felt natural and compelling.”

— Alex Wallberg, General Manager, SPARC Health; Operations Manager, Park City Angels; and Co-Founder, SPARC Labs

What Came Next

The SPARC program became the playbook. The same documentary-style founder package is now available at bulk-rate pricing for trade associations, accelerators, incubators, and VC portfolio groups attending BIO 2026 and similar industry conferences — structured so the companies that need a polished founder narrative the most can actually afford one.

We’re proud of how this work has evolved. From the name on the door to twelve founder films for the cohort, the through-line has been the same: helping life sciences founders tell stories that hold up under scrutiny — clinical, investor, regulatory — and still move people.

More to come.