Commission an animation to explain a scientific concept? I have a particularly difficult scientific concept, which, with the use of an animation, I think I could make very clear. I have some experience making little movies from piecing together figure snapshots, but in this case I lack the skills (and time) to assemble a quality animation. Is anyone aware of a website, resource, or company that will assemble movies for academic purposes? I've looked around but haven't found anything reasonable (in price, or with experience producing scientific-quality movies). 

An example: an animation showing an EKG trace, and a diagram of a beating heart. Each beat moves the heart and shows up on the EKG, so you can see how the two are related.
With such a small budget (less than 1000 US dollars), you're unlikely to be able to commission professional work. 

You have three options that I can see.


You might be able to find someone who's just trying to get established as a provider of such services, who might be willing to do the work in exchange for publicity which you'd have to drum up. Your project, and your department, would have to be seen as endorsing this person's services. That can all be rather tricky. If you're lucky, one of your recently-finishing students might be trying to build their business in this area.
You might be able to learn the skills yourself, or get someone in your team to do so. Some data analysis packages do have the means to create animations from sequences of charts - Matlab has this, and I'd expect its peers such as Mathematica to be able to do that too.
The sort of thing that's been done in a department closely related to the one I work in, is to hold a competition, with the prize being the funds you've got available. It can be open to anyone, or to staff and students, or just to students: that choice may not make a big difference - most of your submissions might come from students anyway. Be careful with the competition terms and conditions: pay close attention to the ownership of the intellectual property of submissions (to ensure you can use submissions without restriction); and with how the prize is described (because of potential tax implications). Your library staff may be able to help with the first of those two issues, and the finance team should be able to help with the second.


What you're after - the skill of creating high-quality data visualisations - is just the sort of skill that we look to encourage and develop in our students, so I'd have no qualms in running this as a competition for the students. The tricky question is around extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation: should they be doing it for money, or for the intrinsic reward of developing excellent data visualisation. You might want to discuss that with the tutor who takes lead responsibility for the students' academic development. It will depend, to an extent, on how close your subject matter is to their areas of study.