Over the past 5 years year there has been 14,000 incidences of trespassing and misuse on Queensland Rail tracks and 2,466 near misses when trespassing. Many of these incidences were school-aged kids putting their lives at risk by not obeying the rules and taking short cuts.

The learnings from research showed teens think they’re invincible and don’t need to listen. As a result Queensland Rail's current safety messages just aren’t cutting through. Queensland Rail wanted to update their rail safety education presentations and resources for schools in order to better connect with teenage school kids ann ultimately engage them with the message.

At the heart of this work was a need to grab teens attention and get them to rethink their current behaviour around railway tracks by stopping them from trespassing. Specifically the goal was to gain positive audience response to Educators during live presentations by arming them

The style of the animation used is inspired by the graphic novel portal Comixology.

Which makes it feel like you're actually reading a graphic novel instead of watching a passive piece of film.

Each scene unveils itself in a classic 2D style, that counters the obvious and heavily used high-gloss high-detail 3D CGI that is so saturated in the world of teenagers these days.

One of the challenges was of course not having the full 24 frames ps in order to tell the story, so we found ourselves having to tell the emotive story through a judicious use of key visuals.

This was made even harder because the narrative comes from a true story, and in order to be sensitive to the owners of that story we need to be mindful of what was represented in each dramatic frame.

It is too early in the life of this work to have a measure on any significant behaviour change with the audience. A key measure for this work was to gain positive audience response to Educators during live presentations and positive feedback from session coordinators and students.

The video received universal positive sentiment by way of the following quotes:

“I like the fact it’s confronting and it’d be good for 10s/11s/12s (high school students) to scare them a bit more… it would hit home. It could happen to my friends.”

“I like the pace of it. It’s slow and it makes it sync in - what’s being said. It’s relatable…”

“Imagine if your best friend was hit by a train. Wouldn’t you want to slow down? Because of them rushing they’ll never see their friend again. This is a serious thing that people need to pay attention to.”