Safety that stops you in your tracks

Rail Cool Rules - a behavioural change campaign for Translink

In our latest collaboration with Translink, we set out to tackle a growing issue across the network: dangerous behaviour on buses and trains, often driven by young people aged 12–20. The impact was being felt across the board, creating negative experiences for passengers, placing added pressure on Translink staff, and ultimately putting the young people themselves at risk.

The big question was, "How do you make a safety campaign resonate with an audience that’s used to scrolling past it?”

This wasn’t just about delivering information on rail safety. It was about making this audience stop, listen, and care. We saw an opportunity to rethink how safety messages are communicated, creating something that speaks directly to young people in a way that feels engaging, relevant, and impossible to ignore, while addressing the real behaviours at the heart of the problem. The campaign blends animation, character-led storytelling and clear messaging to ensure these vital lessons land and stick, allowing Rail Cool Rules to turn everyday safety behaviours into something they can recognise, understand and carry with them throughout their life.

Clarke, why did the Whitenoise team choose a combined animation and video approach for Rail Cool Rules?

"Translink engaged us in October last year to develop the Rail Cool Rules campaign, with the objective of creating a compelling video to reinforce safety awareness among children around railway lines and stations across Northern Ireland. The final output was designed for distribution within schools, specifically targeting P6 and P7 pupils, with each core message also adapted into shorter social edits.

We recommended a combined animation and video approach to address the complexity of the safety messages, allowing us to communicate them accurately, while ensuring the content remained engaging for a younger audience."

- Clarke Duddy, Whitenoise Managing Director

Michael, why was the combination of live-action video and animation such an effective approach for delivering the campaign’s message?

"It was clear from the beginning this project would greatly benefit from a video and animation led approach. Combining video with animation is an effective method of bolstering the production value of a project without inflating the cost beyond the project scope. A key consideration was the target audience. Keeping 9-11 years olds engaged requires a lot of motivation and the main ways to achieve this through video are things like: professional actors, set design, elaborate camera movements etc. These elements greatly inflate the cost of production, so by including animation, we were able to create short and impactful messages within budget that allowed us to think outside the box, show effective safety imagery, keep our audience engaged and give the on-screen-talent some breathing room to focus on the key messages and their delivery.

A win for us and a win for Translink!"

- Michael Reynolds, Head of Film

Ciaran, as lead animator, how did you develop the visual art style for the campaign, and what did the creative process behind that look like?

'In terms of art style we took inspiration from comic strips and blended it with a clean bold character style. We researched comic books and graphic novels in order to develop a bold aesthetic that would appeal to a young audience.

"The framing of the scenes was quite abstract and open so the animation could be adapted into different formats for social media. Combined with a bold font the scenes clearly communicate the safety messages and keep the young audience engaged."

- Ciaran McLaughlin, Animation Lead

Natasha, what creative challenges arose when translating the script into visuals, and how did you approach integrating animation with live-action video to create a cohesive final piece?

"As this video series was aimed at a young audience, the challenge was to create visuals that they found appealing and relatable, whilst also covering a serious topic, rules about rail safety. The animated comic book style was something completely different for Translink, and whilst this approach was new and fresh, it still had to feel like something within the Translink brand.

We worked alongside the video team to make sure the timings and transitions all lined up between video and animated segments, making it one seamless video."

- Natasha Rooney, Animation Lead

"The Whitenoise team took time to really understand our brief, creating bespoke video content that is both informative and engaging."

- Ursula Henderson, Corporate PR Manager at Translink

“By reaching young people we can instil safe and responsible behaviour on and around the railway and wider public transport network reducing the risk of any incidents.”

- Chris Conway, Translink Group Chief Executive