Meet the heroic Met-Man and shady fare evaders of the Manchester Metrolink! This 3-part video series was created for social media and ran alongside a print campaign to raise awareness about Metrolink’s automatic £100 fine for riders who avoid paying for their ticket.
We wanted to put a fun twist on transportation fares… and who knew helping passengers avoid fines could be so much fun!?
Manchester Metrolink wanted to create an awareness campaign telling passengers about the immediate fine for passengers riding without a ticket. The first challenge was delivering a serious message in an approachable way, and with humorous characters that people would connect with.
Another challenge was to meet a tight deadline with several levels of management involvement in decision making on the client’s side. To respond to this challenge, we were able to scale up our animation team to produce the final product on time.
The client had character stories in mind to depict the types of “fare avoiders”, The Dodger and The Excuser—you know, that friend who makes up good excuses! We took a collaborative workshop approach with the client on approving the character drawings, and in addition to the 2D illustrations, we demonstrated how those characters would appear in 3D, to ensure all visual expectations were met.
We decided to take a superhero style approach with the hero, Met-Man, and Metrolink employees working to catch the fare evaders! Though the subject matter of fines is quite serious, we created a fun and approachable atmosphere by incorporating a bright color palette.
When production was ready, we only had a tight three-week time frame for the three spots. Thankfully we are adaptable to the needs of each project, so we scaled up production and organized our pipeline to maximize efficiency and output.
The client was thrilled with the result and felt it was perfectly in line with their initial expectations. They especially enjoyed the process of collaborating with our team and seeing the toy-like characters and vision come to life.
Our team loved developing the eye-catching color palette and customized visual style for this video. The cherry on top was doing character design and bringing the animated heroes of Metrolink to life!
