CSX has released a series of videos and posters to promote safety around railroad tracks developed by Baltimore high school students affiliated with the non-profit Wide Angle Youth Media.
As part of a student-agency partnership, the students were paired with Baltimore’s Exit10 Advertising to put the finishing touches onto the creative. The work is now part of “Play It Safe,” CSX’s public safety outreach initiative running in 23 states with promotions at NASCAR, college basketball and other sporting events.
The first Baltimore-created video, “Parkour,” features an athlete running and flipping his way through an urban landscape only to stop instantly at a train crossing, then continuing once a train has safely passed. Other videos in the series include three short films that equate getting hit by a train to getting hit by 16 million pies flying at 50 miles per hour, for example; and the humorous “Lucky Guy,” showing a distracted pedestrian approaching a railroad crossing.
The two posters feature a driver with a broken-down car and a person slipping on a banana peel with the headline, “Sometimes life stinks!” above the sub-headline, “But not as much as getting hit by a train.”
“We’re proud to work with Wide Angle Youth Media and look forward to using their very creative and entertaining videos and posters to communicate a very important safety message. In the United States, a motorist or pedestrian is struck by a moving train every three hours, and while younger people are an important audience to reach, we believe this work will appeal to audiences of all ages,” said Tori Kaplan, AVP Corporate Social Responsibility and Events at CSX, who first spotted the Baltimore youth media company’s work and suggested it for public service messages sponsored by the railroad.
Since 2000, Wide Angle Youth Media has worked with more than 3,600 youth from across Baltimore City who have produced more than 160 films about their lives and communities.
The CSX videos and posters can be seen and downloaded at beyondourrails.org/safety/youth. CSX is an Exit10 client.
[Photo: Class from Wide Angle Youth Media in Baltimore]
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