Award Nomination:
The Port of Milford Haven worked with Arts & Business Cymru to commission an arts organisation to devise a safety-focused video for its staff, encapsulating its safety culture in a succinct and creative way.
We worked collaboratively with Arts & Business Cymru to commission a local creative partner to create the work for us and chose Span Art’s approach of a one-of-a-kind mixed media film that used animation, photos, and illustration rather than the traditional documentary approach.
The video is 2 minutes long and covers topics such as safety moments, toolbox talks, lone working, what safety means to us as an organisation, with a key focus on stop work authority.
Additional Information
We began the project of creating a safety culture video as we wanted to create an innovative creative tool that would help embed our safety culture as an organisation and would work as an effective safety moment for inducting new starters contractor and visitors.
SPAN Arts were selected following their innovative proposal to work with a talented local animator to produce a one-of-a-kind mixed media film that used animation, photos, and illustration rather than the traditional documentary approach.
We were clear from the offset that we wanted to take a whole team approach, engaging staff across the business in the creative process. Our commitment to Health & Safety is paramount, we do extensive work to ensure it is a vital part of our culture and that every single person on our site, from staff to visitors is empowered and understands their rights and collective responsibilities. This includes correct safe systems of work, training, communication, PPE, safety moments, toolbox talks, team briefs, inductions and more.
We collaborated with Span Arts to ensure that the voice of the real staff involved at the centre of the story was being told. We held in-person creative script writing sessions, facilitated by Span Arts on both port sites. These workshops engaged team members from CEO to dock workers, to office staff to talk about what’s important to them and why. We explored experiences they had experience in and out of work, and how they either acted then, or how that experience could have been improved. Together they created short comics that illustrated different scenarios and recorded audio to be used in the final script.
Using this mixed media animation allowed us to integrate key locations and visuals of the workplace, along with staff voices to ensure a strong sense of creative ownership.
Photos and videos taken on location at the port were used as a basis and animated over with bright, colourful 2D animation. This created more visually exciting footage than standard safety films, connected with the Port brand, and critically got all the key information across.
The video was launched to staff across a variety of channels including the All-Staff CEO Q&A, the Health, Safety & Welfare Committee meeting, and the Management Team meeting, as well as being made available to all staff to watch on the intranet. Success of the video was measured on feedback given, especially in relation to the delivery of the staff given stories. It was also measured in conversations, considering how often the video was referenced in regard to safety, and if language used in the video had filtered into the workplace.
The video was also launched externally on our website, social media and at visitor and contractor inductions as a safety moment. It successfully captures our safety culture, which has been fed back to us across a range of stakeholders. Furthermore, one of our customers is creating a similar video with the same suppliers, which we consider to be a great success as we are inspiring other companies to communicate their safety messages in a similar way.
Niall Yeomans, Port of Milford Haven