Gwent Police: four training films that made a new procedure stick

Gwent Police introduced a new drug testing on arrest procedure and needed every officer to understand it, apply it correctly and record it properly. We made the four films that taught it. The Recognise and Respond identity is its own case study. This one is about the animation.

The outcome

Four internal training films, ten minutes and thirty four seconds of finished animation, delivered between November 2022 and November 2023. One for the officer at the scene, one for the custody sergeant working through the forms, one walking through the app built to support the procedure, and a fourth widening the argument to domestic abuse, sexual offences and serious violence.

The challenge

This is statutory procedure, not a message. Section 63B of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, a list of trigger offences, an age threshold at 18 and another at 14, an authorisation chain that runs to Inspector level, and four separate forms that each have to be completed by the right person at the right moment. Get any of it wrong on screen and you have trained hundreds of officers incorrectly.

The audience makes it harder. These films are watched by people who have been sent internal comms before and have learned to skim it. Anything that looked like a campaign rather than a briefing would be closed inside ten seconds.

Be curious.

Two words from the first script, and the actual behavioural ask underneath all the procedure. Most of the work was making that feel like advice from a colleague rather than an instruction from headquarters.

Our approach

Pitch the drawing at the subject matter. The art direction was set deliberately against the house style of most explainer animation. From our own concept deck at the time: a style that is figurative yet fairly simple and pared back, with characters realistically proportioned to keep things from looking too cartoony, which would not feel appropriate given the subject matter. The same deck committed to diverse representation of cultures, genders and ages across the cast, particularly among the officers and supporting colleagues, and the finished films carry it.

Make a chain of forms legible. The custody film is the hard one. It walks the entire booking-in sequence: the DT4 at initial booking, the detainee informed of their rights including legal advice before any sample, the custody sergeant deciding whether there is cause not to test, the duty to consult the arrest referral team, the DT1 on the decision, the DT2 for the result, and an RA1 serving the assessment appointment with a recorded oral warning. It runs four minutes fifteen against a script estimate of two forty two, because a twenty six step procedure does not compress and we did not pretend otherwise.

Build one world and keep going back to it. The custody film deliberately reuses the cast and locations established in the first, adding only a few new ones. That was a production decision as much as a creative one: it meant the second film skipped the concept art stage entirely, and it means an officer watching both recognises the same station, the same colleagues and the same detainee from one briefing to the next.

Animate the tool as well as the rule. Gwent Police also had an app built to carry officers through the procedure on the phone already in their pocket. The third film is a walkthrough of it: select your role, choose trigger or non trigger, follow the prompts to an outcome, tap the question mark when a term is unfamiliar. It is the shortest film of the four at a minute fourteen, and the only one whose job is to make somebody open something else.

Handle the hardest subject with restraint. The fourth film widens out from procedure to why any of it matters, linking substance misuse to domestic abuse, sexual offences and serious violence. It is the only one that had to dramatise harm, and the note in our concept deck was explicit: it needed impact without being too graphic. So the difficult moments are staged and implied rather than shown, the camera turns away, and the film resolves on the thing the whole programme exists for, which is getting somebody into treatment.

What it does for Gwent Police

A procedure that officers can actually be trained on, in a form they will sit through. The four films split cleanly by audience, so nobody watches twenty six steps of custody paperwork they will never perform. They can be reissued to every new intake without booking a room, they name the forms and the legislation precisely enough to be relied on, and because one voice and one drawn world run through all four, they read as a single programme rather than four separate memos.

Credits

• Client: Gwent Police
• Programme: Recognise and Respond
• Studio: Alchemy, then trading as Tiny Wizard Studio
• Series: four films, 10 minutes 34 seconds, delivered November 2022 to November 2023
• Formats: 1920 x 1080 for the first two films, 3840 x 2160 for the later two
• Voiceover: a single voice artist across all four films
• Music: Feeling Oblivions by Big Score Audio and Team Building by Crescent Music, licensed through PremiumBeat
• Language: English