Bitesize safety animations for the Energy Institute
Bringing safety information to life for a global workforce
The challenge
The EI is a leading provider of technical publications on health, safety, environment, and fuel quality. Through its web-based app, Toolbox, it shares real incident lessons and safety insights from global energy companies with frontline workers, accessible on any device.
Following a successful 2019 launch and additional funding, the EI expanded Toolbox to better meet workforce needs. Kineo was commissioned to create a series of short, 2–3 minute animations focused on high-risk incidents, clearly explaining what happened, why, and key safety takeaways. The content was designed for a global, multilingual audience, integrated with existing Toolbox resources, and optimised for all devices.
The Solution
For the animations to be effective, they needed to be authentic, impactful and pack an emotional punch. That meant staying true to the reality of the incidents as they unfolded, whilst balancing the need for brevity.
Any incident that results in injury to a team member has the power to make co-workers sit up and take notice. The animations needed to provoke an emotional response – enough to make the audience reflect on their own safety processes and behaviours and ask “What’s to stop that happening at our site?”.
At their core, the animations were designed around the human need to keep self and others safe. The scenes showed what went wrong, then ‘rewound’ the action to show what could have been done to avoid the incident happening in the first place.
Break down the language barrier
To make the learning useful to as wide an audience as possible, it was important to deliver the safety points through the visuals themselves, without relying on a voiceover narrator explaining the action. The design delivered on this by using a combination of split screens, zooms, freeze frames and annotations to make the key messages stand out and be comprehensible without the need for an explanatory voice. The design team also used ambient sounds, sound effects and indicative dialogue (think Pingu meets Morph) to convey a sense of place and dialogue between the on-screen characters.
Action focused content
A key part of any successful learning is how well it builds the bridge between the theory and the practice. To encourage reflection and drive behaviour change, each animation ends with a series of reflective questions, to encourage learners to interrogate their own actions and behaviours on site.
The animations have a dual audience – supervisors who lead a team, and individuals who want to improve their personal awareness. For supervisors, the questions can be used to drive a discussion when the animations are viewed in a group setting (perhaps at the start of a shift). The questions also needed to be phrased to resonate with individual viewers, and be applicable to them. Key to both audiences was the need for a ‘call to action’ – a question or reflection point that pushed them to make a tangible improvement in how work was being carried out.
Creative collaboration and teamwork
Part of the success of this project was the collaborative way that the Kineo and EI teams worked together. From the initial design conversations and workshops, right through to storyboards, exemplars and the finished deliverables there was ongoing dialogue between the teams. That meant screenshares, discussions and ideas sessions focusing in on how the animations could be honed, tweaked, improved.
For such a visual and creative project with such important safety details, this approach was vital to ensuring the animations looked right, sounded right and delivered the right messages in the most effective and impactful way.
The results
Visually impactful and clear animations driving behavioural change
The EI is now deploying the animations as part of Toolbox. They have planned an active communication campaign and will make the animations freely available to everyone on the Toolbox platform. The app currently contains 320+ lessons learnt based on real incidents, shared by the EI’s industry partners, with more being added regularly.
Toolbox is freely available at https://toolbox.energyinst.org. If you would like to share content on Toolbox, and/or help fund further developments, contact Stuart King.