Los Angeles County Metro, the premiere transit agency in the country, and Los Angeles County's second largest employer, wanted our help getting the word out that they were not just a bus company. We were thrilled at the chance to illustrate how cool and edgy an ostensibly dry, quasi-dotGOV could be.

The Set Up

When a massive 72 percent of LA County voters approved Measure M, a sales tax measure that generated $120 billion over 40 years to expand rail, rapid bus and bike networks, Metro and Metro Art suddenly had a different kind of challenge—-how to convey its value proposition in a rapidly-changing landscape of ride-shares and e-scooters?

The Picture+Sound creative team went deep in the discovery phase. Real deep. As in, deep down beneath the city. And far. And wide, across LA County. On buses, bikes and trains. And we emerged from our sojourn with a passion for Metro the transit agency, but more so Metro, the largest purveyor and exhibitor of art in the country. After all, with its 200 permanent installations in its 200 stations and the 50 events Metro Art Presents hosts every year, Metro indeed was the biggest, hardest, heaviest moving museum in the world.

But most museums are about immobility, the staid that stays put, and Metro is anything but. Metro moves. Its buses, bikes and trains move. It moves people’s bodies, but Picture+Sound needed to show that Metro and Metro Art could move the heart, mind and soul.

The Action

Picture+Sound leveraged the heavy tonnage of Metro Art’s live concerts, dance, spoken word, theater, film screenings and more to illustrate the panoply of offerings laid out to a uber-diverse community. We told the story of Metro and Metro Art in an exciting, highly charged suite of short films and promos featuring top musicians, sculptors, and artists moving and creating in the megacity that is Los Angeles.

Metro’s social media channels got a huge boost from Picture+Sound, as we conceived and created a suite of social media-native short films, made to drive both digital traffic to Metro Art’s channels, and physical traffic to Metro Art’s events.

Then Metro Art asked us to create a “home run” government advocacy project, cause the folks upstairs needed something to take to Washington to keep the resource “train on track”, as it were. We created a powerful film that rocked the halls as well as the chambers of Congress.

And the hits kept coming. Picture+Sound was awarded the creative and production reigns on a high-end docu-series featuring world-renown artists doing the heavy lift of permanent installations throughout the multi-billion dollar Purple Line Extension (PLE).This long-arc, longitudinal series, continues to span nearly a decade of time and a hundred miles of track.

As if the PLE wasn’t plaudits enough, Picture+Sound was asked to capture the Airport Metro Connector project, a groundbreaking, interactive multi format opus on visionary multimedia artist Glenn Kaino’s creation at the “Gateway to California”.

Then things really jumped off...

Metro’s Office of Inspector General asked us to create an episodic series. From the ground up. An Oprah Winfrey-style long-form interview show that focused on the Lessons Learned from prominent Southern California heavy hitters.

The Payoff

Movement became the core working theme of every piece of Picture+Sound’s work with LA County Metro. From its :60 Metro Art Brand Anthem Hot Cut, that used a gorgeous mix of aerial photography, stop motion photography, hyper-lapse, and time-lapse shot in linear or perpendicular tracking fashion to replicate ones vantage point on a bus or train.

We moved the perception of riders, other Angelenos, and national stakeholders to not just enjoy the journey, but think of Metro Art as an enriching experience along the way, and a destination.

Our films “jumped track”, as they were featured at international conferences, partner sites like nightlight website Restless Nights, and on broadcast giants including Spectrum Cable to name a few.

Back at home base in historic Union Station, Metro Art Presents saw packed capacity live shows, rave word of mouth throughout the city, and record-breaking, off the charts social metrics on Instagram, Facebook, Smugmug and Twitter scoring the three biggest social media posts in the history of Metro Art. And that just a few ways Picture+Sound told Metro’s story.

As our work continues, Metro is a transit agency perfectly positioned to make the most of hosting the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, and going forward Metro will continue to be known not just for it’s movement, but as a Movement.

Categories

The Set Up

The Action

The Payoff