Campaign Poster – images supplied by Visual Culture
Now matter how big or small your business, Health and Safety is a crucial topic. Although important, it’s a message that can be challenging to engage employees, suppliers and customers with. The reason for this varies; it often comes down to company culture, what senior leaders think about the topic and how the information is presented company wide.
From our experience of producing safety videos over the years, we find that clients are requesting safety messaging to be condensed where possible. Still getting the same messaging across, but in a shorter duration. Often companies have toolbox safety meetings which may only last 10-15 minutes, the impact of a short 2-3 minute video within that meeting can really help illustrate and emphasise key points.
In this feature article, we look at how our client – the TrackSAFE Foundation tackled the safety message in a creative and powerful way with the help of video. The end result was a clever way to show safety messaging in an engaging way. Key messages included: being mindful of barriers and signals, respecting fellow commuters, dangers around level crossings, the trauma that can be associated with rail accidents, and of course keeping rail staff and the public safe.
Rail Safety Week (RSW) is an Australasian Railway Association (ARA)/ TrackSAFE initiative that has been running since 2006. Our brief was to create a 2-3 minute video featuring vox pop style interviews with 5-7 members of the public to raise awareness about rail safety. Theonline video would drive the promotional campaign for RSW, which also featured campaign posters and radio ads.
The core for the campaign is ‘Rail safety – it’s everyone’s responsibility’. With this in mind, we presented an idea to produce the video as a ‘pass-the-baton’ style, a day in the life of the Rail network. Essentially each of our characters would cross paths throughout the video, linking from one safety message to the next. Our characters featured train drivers, commuters, school students, police officers, station masters and the TrackSafe patron, Tim Fischer AC. 
To emphasise key points, each character held up a sign in the final scene with the words “Rail Safety – It’s My Responsibility”. We also had an opportunity to gather extra footage from various state rail networks. Day one we filmed around Melbourne, day 2 we headed up to Albury and surrounds, but the video also features footage from Brisbane, Perth and Sydney – a truly national snapshot of the rail industry
Rail Safety Week is on this week Monday 10 – 14 August. For more information and to view the campaign video visit
http://tracksafefoundation.com.au/rail-safety-week/.