The Safety Factor — songs, not lectures

The Safety For Students campaign had a problem every safety campaign has: the people who most need to hear the message are the least interested in being lectured about it. Chris Murray's answer was to stop doing the lecturing. Put the message in the kids' mouths instead, let them write it as songs and characters, and film the results.

That became The Safety Factor, the campaign's debut episode, shot at St. George's Public School in London. The format was a competition. Acts, each one a song or a message or a character built by students, performed for the camera, with the whole thing hosted by Chris Murray. We shot it as a show rather than as a public service announcement, which is the whole reason it worked — the energy in the room was theirs, not ours.

It ran seventeen and a half minutes. Acts Q, R and W came out of it as the finalists, and the finish was handed to the audience: the campaign's website took votes on which of the three should take the grand prize. That is a smart piece of design. The film does not end when you stop watching it — it sends you to a website to pick a winner, and the kids who made the final three have a reason to send it to everyone they know.

The campaign was more than the episode. The site carried safety tips and internet-safety pages, and it ran its own events — a poster competition in May, with a helmet donated by a bike shop here in London as the prize for one student's message. The film was the loud part. The site was the part that kept going.

The job was more than the film, too. We built the campaign's look as well: the Safety Factor logo, web banners, the web ad, the DVD disc label and the cover insert. We authored the disc itself, and the disc runs longer than the cut online. It all went out in March 2012.

What I liked about this one is that it solved its own problem. A safety message delivered by an adult is something a kid endures. A safety message delivered by a classmate, in a song, wearing a costume, is something a kid repeats. The campaign understood that, and it built the whole thing around it instead of putting a talking head in front of a camera. We were there to make the version of it that could actually travel.

The other thing I remember is how much of the work was design. A campaign like this lives or dies on whether it looks like something worth paying attention to — the logo, the banners, the disc, the way the episode opens. That part is not the film. It is the thing that makes people decide to watch the film, and it was as much of the job as the shoot.

Watching it again, what holds up is the kids. They are the reason the episode still works: they are not performing at the audience, they are performing for each other, and that is a much harder thing to direct and a much better thing to watch.

We put it on our own channel in March 2012, where it has sat ever since.

PRODUCER / DIRECTOR · BRYAN BAKKER