RWE: Our energy for a sustainable life

RWE AG is a German multinational energy company headquartered in Essen. It generates and trades electricity in Asia-Pacific, Europe and the United States. The company is the world’s number two in offshore wind power and Europe’s third-largest in renewable energy.

RWE has reliably supplied people and companies with electricity for more than 120 years – night and day. They have a clear objective: climate neutral by 2040.

RWE approached Tiny Wizard Studio to create a series of five animated videos to explain their new structure and processes to their workforce all over the world. RWE had a clear vision in mind, to communicate the new career progression and aspirations model, the new pay model, performance management processes, recruitment processes and their health and wellbeing policies.

We worked closely with the internal HR and marketing teams to discover the key messages, and understand the new processes they were putting in place to ensure an informative experience for their employees. The challenge was editing and distilling the initial content provided by RWE into a digestible script that would translate into a 3 minute or less animation.

The main challenge for these videos was that they needed to be diverse enough to be inclusive of the global RWE workforce. It would have been easy to ditch the people element altogether and exclude any character artwork to avoid this challenge, but people are at the heart of these RWE announcements and so it was important to include characters to communicate the important processes that would affect the entire staff.

We agreed to explore humanoid characters without specific races or gender so that we could visualise relationships and communication, without the risk of exclusion.

Once the concept art and character development were agreed upon, the wizards set to work storyboarding all five videos to combine the scripts and concept art into cohesive stories for review by the RWE team.

At this stage, we worked on a few variations of the environments throughout the videos and ensured that the colours, styles and themes aligned with the RWE brand.

Our animation wizards set about building the characters and drawing the environments and bringing the animations to life with voiceover, music and magical transitions. With such clear checkpoints along the way and time for feedback and evolution, there were very few tweaks to be made upon delivery of the animations. Some small tweaks to pacing and background colours were made to add finesse at this stage.

We really enjoyed working with RWE and we’re thrilled with the outcome. It just goes to show, that animation isn’t just for marketing, it’s perfect for internal training and announcements too.