Melbourne Water was preparing an internal communication and engagement programme around the Melbourne Sewerage Strategy and the longer-term strategic plans for its treatment plants.
The underlying material was important, but dense. It dealt with population growth, climate change, environmental limits, circular economy thinking, future scenarios, infrastructure, policy, resilience and decisions that would unfold over decades.
The animation was not supposed to explain all of that. Its job was to give employees an accessible way into the subject before deeper material followed through articles, podcasts, webinars, the intranet and other conversations.
Find the idea before making the video
I developed the narrative concept and wrote the script.
Rather than trying to compress the entire strategy into a short animation, I built the story around one question:
What is the most important question we should be asking?
The script first considers why. The reasons for change were already visible: Melbourne’s population was growing, the climate was changing and the existing way of doing things could not simply continue indefinitely.
Then it considers what and how. The broad direction was also understood — including the move from treating waste for discharge towards recovering resources and thinking more circularly.
The narrative then turns to the question that matters most:
When?
Make a long-term strategy feel immediate
That shift gave the communication its point.
Transformation at this scale requires decisions, policy, community engagement and infrastructure. All of those take time to plan and implement. So a strategy about the coming decades is also about choices being made now.
The script lands on two deliberately simple lines:
This is the decade that matters.
What you do today, matters.
Instead of asking a short video to carry the whole strategy, the animation could do one job well: create curiosity, establish urgency and lead people towards the deeper material.
Produce the idea with the right specialists
I produced the project through Light Animations and provided creative direction through development and production.
The specialist illustration and animation work was subcontracted to an external agency working with us under the Light Animations banner. My role was to hold the communication idea, script and creative direction together while the production specialists brought the visual execution to life.
The finished piece became the opening narrative for a broader internal engagement programme — a short communication designed not to answer every question, but to help people understand which question mattered first.