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Bitesize safety animations for the Energy Institute

About Energy Institute

The Energy Institute (EI) is the chartered professional membership body bringing together expertise to tackle urgent global challenges. It gathers and shares essential knowledge about energy, provides the skills that are helping us all use it more wisely, and develops the good practice needed to keep it safe and secure. It articulates the voice of energy experts, taking the know-how of around 20,000 members and 200 companies from 120 countries to the heart of the public debate.  

Key project features

Kineo Scenario based animations
Kineo Multi-device
Kineo Global audience & multiple languages

THE CHALLENGE

Bring safety information to life for a global workforce

The EI is a leading provider of technical publications covering health, safety, environment, fuel quality and distribution. These include good practice guidance, test methods, measurement manuals, conferences, and workshops. 

The EI is freely sharing incident lessons and safety insights from leading energy companies to frontline workers through Toolbox, an innovative web-based app. Featuring content based on real life incidents, Toolbox has been created in partnership with several leading global energy companies, and can be accessed on the go on any device. 

After the successful launch in September 2019 the EI secured new funding from its partner network to expand Toolbox, making content even more relevant for today’s workforce.  

EI commissioned Kineo to design and create a series of short animations exploring insights and safety information for high risk situations. The animations needed to: 

  • Be short in length, no more than 2 to 3 mins
  • Focus on specific incidents and clearly show what happened, why it happened, and provide key learnings to help users remain safe 
  • Work for a global audience, in multiple languages 
  • Sit alongside and support existing content within Toolbox 
  • Work on multiple devices via a single instance 



ENERGY INSTITUTE'S SOLUTION

Keep it real

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

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’s Stuart King, project manager for Toolbox, says: 

“Throughout, Kineo showed a real understanding of the project’s needs, and their knowledge of the energy sector helped bring the incidents to life. I was impressed by the speed at which they worked, and at how well our two teams worked together. The animations will be great additions to Toolbox.”


Take a look at the video below to see how the finished animations came to life.



Next steps

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.


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