When TfL made the switch to contactless payments it was one of the biggest digital changes ever undertaken across a transport organisation and it required a communications strategy with equal impact.

We worked alongside TFL and their comms agency to meet an extremely ambitious 3D animation brief to tell the story of customer journeys in this new, contactless world across several films.

Solution

Without a doubt the biggest challenge of this project was planning clever ways to create and re-use as many 3D assets as possible. The second biggest was creating a character-driven film without the typical time required.

To solve this the decision was made to use contactless cards and Oyster cards to tell the story, treating them like little characters. We modelled and animated a diverse set of card-shaped characters and used super-simple 3D modelling and texturing to produce backgrounds and sets for the characters to interact with.

The goal was to tell the story in the same way you might with a live action video but with one key difference: we were able to show anything we needed to in the 3D world. This meant that we could include full, real-world scenes but we could easily simplify sections of the film to include easy-to-understand graphics like maps, symbols, and even simplified user interfaces to mimic the website experience. This was a simple way to get things across to the viewer and allowed us to keep sections of the film simple enough to lighten the workload enough to meet the timeline and budget of the films.

Results

These films were widely released and achieved hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and other social channels. Without plenty of animation expertise and willingness to take a simple, modular approach to producing 3D animation these films would not have been achievable for TfL. We’re really proud of finding a way to help bring these films to life.

In collaboration with Belong Comms