Silent Film Festival’s Trailers – The World First Instagram Film Experience

The Toronto Silent Film Festival has taken to another new-media platform to promote its upcoming event. The festival has set up three Instagram accounts, which each contain “trailers” for silent movies. There’s tsff_1, which showcases Murnau’s classic Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans; tsff_2, featuring an excerpt from the 1925 feature Tumbleweeds; and tsff_3, taken from the Del Lord short Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies. To view each trailer, head to the relevant Instagram account on your smartphone and scroll rapidly though the images to create a flip book-like effect.

The idea for the novel advertising method came from Canadian advertising agency Cossette, which explained its thinking behind the campaign to Creative Review: “It feels appropriate to be using a technology like Instagram to promote the silent film technique,” says co-chief creative officer Matt Litzinger, explaining that silent film was “in its day.. every bit as ground-breaking and innovative as digital platforms are today.”

Agency: Cossette
Co-CCOs, Creative Directors: Matthew Litzinger, David Daga
Copywriter: Sebastian Lyman
Art Director: Pepe Bratanov
Year: 2013