In this film we follow the story of two real life teens as they hurry to get to a party. The decisions they make lead to tragedy.

On a wet and rainy night, the two boys race to get to the station. thinking they can make better time, they cut across the tracks but one boy, misjudges the distance and tragically loses his life.

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

Australian kids are very desensitised to safety messages. Feeling as though they're invincible.

In Australia there is also a youth culture of social media bravado that is causing Australian kids to take films of themselves doing dangerous things around rail tracks.

The horrifying volume of teenaged children that have been risking their lives around railway tracks has seen many hundreds of equally horrifying stories emerge about fatalities and near misses.

These real stories have inspired the work.

Through co-creation with teenagers we recreated just one of those terrible tragedies, being sensitive to all parties involved, to make the film 'Tales from the track'.

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.