Health, safety and 3D design
3D animations have become staples of educational safety content. What makes them so useful?
Image Credit: Jeridan Villegas, Unsplash
In critical industries such as construction, manufacturing, chemical production and transport logistics, health and safety is a more important issue than ever. In the modern work environment, it is both the moral and legal responsibility of employers to ensure their workers abide by safety legislation created by external safety boards.
When accidents do occur, it often comes due to ignorant or lax attitudes towards contemporary safety protocols, incentivised in the private sector by a desire to achieve maximum profit.[1]
In a United States Chemical Safety Board (USCSB) video[2], Professor Trevor Kletz summarises the folly of such thinking: “If you think safety is expensive, try an accident.” Even taking into account the often vast financial expense caused by accidents at industrial plants, the human cost and damage to a company’s reputation is often even more catastrophic.
For this reason, great effort and expense has been expended on safety education media since the simple public service announcements of the 40’s and 50’s. As years passed, presentations began to extensively use reconstruction footage using actors, sketched animations of safety hazards and photographs of accident sites.
In the last 20 years, the use of CGI in the production of safety content has seen a meteoric rise. CGI offers lower costs for media production, greater convenience when recreating complicated accident sites and can easily be combined with videography or photography as needed.
As the use of CGI has increased, so has the quality. Major animation and rendering improvements have resulted in much more visually impressive safety animations being produced over the last decade. This rise in quality can easily be observed on prominent safety YouTube channels by comparing recent content to videos produced in the early 2010s.
Image Credit: Ümit Yildirim, Unsplash
Interestingly, the advent of bigger-budget, highly detailed CGI animations used for these safety videos has resulted in a dedicated audience for them. Several safety concerns, such as the aforementioned USCSB and WorkSafeBC[3] (a Canadian safety board) maintain sizeable YouTube followings.
USCSB videos in particular focus upon high-budget CGI animated safety content combined with real life interviews. This content draws in millions of views from the general public as well as those from the chemical industry. Comments from site users frequently discuss how entertaining and interesting the animations are; a massive win for educational content, which has often failed to elicit such reactions in the past.
Even leaving aside the massive potential for greater audience engagement, CGI also offers very practical utility over more traditional safety video production techniques. Accident sites that may be hazardous to re-visit in real life (or impossible to view due to complete destruction of a site) can be reproduced with great levels of realism through CGI. Certain aspects of an accident can be “freeze-framed” or accentuated in order to more easily demonstrate issues to an audience.
Machinery components can also be accurately simulated through hard-surface modelling and animated with lighting and coloured materials to provide a schematic showing equipment faults. Gases and liquids can be simulated with incredible realism in programs such as Houdini (the current industry standard) and Blender.
With the utility and freedom modern CGI offers safety content producers, it is clear that 3D graphics will be used ever more increasingly in the sector in the coming years.
As videogame and raytracing engines continue to increase in graphical fidelity, it seems likely that the move from classical safety PSAs into full-blown animated documentaries will continue, attracting large, engaged audiences.
Undoubtedly, CGI has proved a very useful tool in the safety education arsenal. Pairing modern, high-quality content with distribution on YouTube and other mainstream video platforms is, for the first time in history, helping to get vitally important safety information to a much greater array of people.
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MM3D Graphics is a provider of high quality animations and still renders for safety media purposes in addition to advertising and scientific media. If you’d like to discuss producing a safety media package with us, contact us here today.
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References:
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo7H_ILs1qc&ab_channel=USCSB - “Falling Through the Cracks” - USCSB, 2013.
[2] - https://youtu.be/XuJtdQOU_Z4?si=vycpLlNWRK-hlU_Z - “Anatomy of a Disaster” - USCSB, 2008.
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/@worksafebc - WorkSafeBC YouTube channel.
