ABOUT

The Brief:

To launch the new season of Orange Is The New Black, VOD giant Netflix wanted to create a social video that engaged fans who had potentially dropped off from the franchise as well as making their existing fan base aware that the start of the new season was fast approaching.

The show, which became an instant hit with its release in 2013, portrays a women’s prison in America and has been praised as a truly diverse engagement with the realities of such an environment. As it is with some of the studios, due to IP rights, the project needed to be completed without using live action and therefore the brief went out to The Smalls' animators.

The Solution:

Through leveraging The Smalls' global community, we were able to reach a diverse range of filmmakers, including academy award winners, who pitched for the project. In the end, the Slovenia-based Institute of Contemporary Arts, FINTA, were commisioned to take on the challenge. Despite this being their first pitch on a commercial project FINTA was the perfect choice, due to the fact that they are a stop motion animation studio specialising in puppetry.

To re-engage the audience and promote the new season, FINTA recreated the most iconic scenes using puppet animation, as well as producing social media cutdowns which were used to depict memorable scenes.

The Outcome:

During production the season was leaked online, thus bringing forward our completion date, this meant that the length of time between the brief and the delivery was only 6 short weeks.

Despite this, FINTA successfully completed the project within the time frame and the animation for OITNB has gained a whopping 6M views online so far and now lives on both OITNB and Netflix’s social media channels. Through selecting a range of moments from across the 4 seasons, it meant that individuals were able to share their favourite scenes, thus further driving social interaction. The film has since won a Drum Creative Award in the Animation Category.