Animation

RWE Generation UK: a five film series explaining HR change to an energy workforce

Fifteen minutes of 4K animation, appointed on tender and delivered across 2021

Client

RWE Generation UK

Services

Animation

Year

2021

Outcome

Five animated films for RWE Generation UK, explaining a new pay model, development and wellbeing.

The numbers

Films in the series

Minutes of finished animation

Delivery resolution

Months from first film to last

RWE Generation UK runs power stations. In 2021 it changed how its people are paid, how they plan their careers, and how it talks to them about both. We were appointed on tender to make the films that explained all of it, and the series ran to five.

The outcome

Five animated films, fifteen minutes of finished 4K animation, delivered between March and October 2021. Together they carry a new pay structure, a replacement for the personal development plan, the performance conversation that sits around both, and later two more on recruitment and wellbeing. Every one of them ends on the same card, so five separate films read as one series.

Film one: Progression and Aspirations.

The challenge

This is internal communication about pay, which is the least forgiving brief there is. Staff were being moved onto a new structure with four stages, a raised minimum salary and a second review cycle each year. Get the tone wrong and it reads as management spin. Get the detail wrong and it is worse than useless, because people make decisions about their own money from it.

The content is also genuinely dry. Pay ranges, review windows, recruitment compliance, right to work checks. It has to be exact, and it still has to hold someone for three minutes.

It's not all about monitoring underperformance.

A line from the Performance Management script, and the problem the whole series had to solve: make policy feel like it is for you rather than about you.

Our approach

Animate the brand's own device. RWE's identity was barely a year old when we started, built on gradient "energy fields" that its manual explicitly says can be animated in digital applications. We took that at its word. The wave and line patterns that sit as static texture in the guidelines become landscape in the films: rolling hills, backgrounds, the shapes that wipe between scenes. The sector stays visible in the skyline too, with cooling towers and pylons behind the office furniture.

The brand's gradient and its energy field patterns, doing the work of a landscape.

Give the abstract a date and a place. A pay structure is a spreadsheet. On screen it becomes two people at a desk in January, a laptop headed End of Year Review, a calendar on the wall. The new mid-year cycle gets the same treatment. Nobody has to hold an abstraction in their head, because the film puts the conversation in a room and shows when it happens.

Two illustrated colleagues at a desk with a laptop reading RWE End of Year Review, beside a January calendar. — The review cycle, given a room and a month.

Film two: the new pay model.

Write one film for two audiences. Most of these films are watched by the person the policy applies to and by the manager who has to run it. So the scripts carry both, in sequence and clearly signposted: here is your part, here is theirs. The Progression and Aspirations film sets out what the employee owns and what the manager supports, and puts the actual headings of the plan on screen so people recognise the form when they open it.

A character in a plant stairwell beside a screen listing development needs and future career aspirations. — The real headings from the plan, so the form is familiar before you open it.

Put the workforce on screen as it actually is. RWE asked for this directly in the script notes: a character with a medical awareness badge, and a character with a prosthetic limb or wheelchair, to cover visible and invisible conditions. It runs through the cast rather than appearing once as a gesture, alongside a spread of ages, roles and presentations, and both sides of the business, stations and corporate.

A cutaway office interior with colleagues at desks, including a wheelchair user, in flat vector illustration. — Representation built into the cast rather than added as a gesture.

Film three: performance management.

Let the series follow the business. The original plan had films four and five covering two more stages of the pay cycle. By the time we got there RWE needed something else, so the last two became recruitment and wellbeing instead. Recruitment is aimed squarely at hiring managers, walking the policy from shortlisting to offer. Wellbeing promotes the support that already existed and that people were not using enough.

Two colleagues at a noticeboard headed Shortlist, covered in candidate CVs. — Recruitment, written for the hiring manager rather than the candidate.

Film four: recruitment.

Film five: health and wellbeing.

What it does for RWE Generation UK

A workforce that can be told about a change to their pay in three minutes, in a form they will actually watch, and be pointed at the right page of the HR portal at the end of it. The series does the job a briefing pack cannot: it reaches shift workers and office staff with the same message, it can be rewatched by anyone who missed the roll out, and it gives managers something to run a conversation from. RWE wrote the policy. We wrote it for screen.