Safely drilling deeper

Overview –

Transocean had invested heavily in WorkSight – it’s new behavioural based safety scheme. Now it was time to train staff across the organisation in how to use it and, equally importantly, why.

They came to Reuzer looking for something above and beyond a basic image-and-bullet-point presentation. We took the brief and ran with it, creating three high-quality animated courses that bring Transocean’s vital messages to life.

Who?

Founded in 1954, Transocean is the world’s largest offshore drilling services contractor for oil and gas wells. Headquartered in Switzerland, it has offices in 20 countries, and owns and operates a vast offshore drilling fleet, including harsh-environment, ultra-deepwater, deepwater, and midwater rigs.

Transocean prides itself on its motivated people, quality equipment, and innovative technology, as well as consistently raising the bar for safety.

What?

Transocean engaged us to produce three 20-minute courses as part of its WorkSight programme, each course reflecting a different part of the scheme, designed for employees at different levels of the business.

This behavioural-safety learning was centred around employees taking safety seriously – seeing something, saying something, and recording it on the WorkSight system, using tablets installed on rigs and in offices, rather than ignoring it.

With employees inputting data into WorkSight, Transocean could identify where incidences were taking place, what kind of incidences were happening, and make changes to address them.

Transocean wanted the training to show its people why their input was so important, where their data went, and how they would respond to that data to keep everyone safe.

Planning

With so much importance placed on safety, the client wanted something extra special to make WorkSight come to life for its employees. Each course would include static material, including frequently asked questions, a software run-through, and a short assessment.

We decided the rest of the course would be 3D-animated and presented several animation styles for our client to choose from.

We settled on one where narrator characters walk through an abyss, while animated objects appeared around them, as well as on-site scenarios featuring multiple characters that bring the learning to life. We created a 30-second pilot, including a voiceover artist, so Transocean could see exactly what the finished result would look like.

The scripting was the longest part of the process, which we created in collaboration with the client, so they could have complete oversight. We wanted to get the scripts as close to perfect as possible, with approvals from senior management, to avoid the high costs involved with reproducing animation if changes need to be made in post-production.

Production

With the scripts signed off and three different voiceover artists selected, we storyboarded the animation, thinking of ways we could bring the abyss moments to life without simply having text on the screen. Then animation could begin. This included creating 12 unique characters, all with their own walk cycles and expressions to make the animation feel as realistic as possible, and lip syncing all the voiceovers.

Our team spent two months crafting the animated content, delivering a high-quality finish, before bringing everything together – including a welcome message recorded by Transocean’s President and COO.

Result

The sign-off process was relatively smooth, thanks to all the work we had put in up front to make sure the scripts and storyboards were up to scratch. With a round of feedback and a few tweaks, the final product was ready for Transocean to start sharing with their employees. And we could move on to creating versions in Brazilian Portuguese and Norwegian for Transocean’s other territories.

This is clearly one of the big benefits of producing e-learning in 3D animation over filming real people. Simply swap out the voice over and it’s applicable for a whole other market with a consistent message going out across the workforce. It’s also easy for Transocean to make any changes to the content in future, without needing to pay for expensive reshoots.

Feedback

“At Transocean, we appreciate the importance of visual, effective, informative training.

The Reuzer team have a solid reputation for delivering top quality custom built digital content relating to the oil and gas sector, so the collaboration felt like a great fit for both teams! And we weren’t disappointed. By working together with Reuzer, we gave them a vision of what we wanted which forced them to think out the box for some solutions and then deliver exactly what we asked for – visual, effective and easy to understand e-learning which will, we have no doubt, engage and help train our global workforce in our Assurance and Verification Tool: WorkSight.

Once completed we also asked Reuzer to translate the WorkSight suite of e-learnings into Portuguese and Norwegian to ensure they could be fully utilized in all other areas of our current operations. Great Job.”

Graham Cameron, HSE Manager, HSE Training and Development / Integration and Reactivation. Transocean.

In Summary

“Transocean put a lot of trust in the Reuzer team. They had seen some of our content, knew we had good knowledge of the oil and gas sector, and clearly thought we could deliver something different from standard off-the-shelf e-learning. And they were right! It was great working with the Transocean team, and we’re really proud of the project.”

Ian Smith, Founder, Reuzer