The Toronto Silent Film Festival has a history of innovative interactive campaigns. In fact, this year’s campaign, The Instagram Jigsaw Puzzle, by Red Lion Canada is its fifth Instagram first in a row.

It’s also the first time anyone has thought to use Instagram to make a jigsaw puzzle.

“We have been partners with The Toronto Silent Film Festival for some time now and every year I’m impressed with their desire to push the envelope creatively, to want a creative execution that can be noticed globally,” stated Matt Litzinger, president & chief creative officer of Red Lion.

This year, the festival featured a series of films previously thought to be lost forever. They have been brought back to life through a meticulous restoration process. This process, Litzinger explained, led to the idea of a jigsaw puzzle.

“For silent film historians, piecing together a lost silent film is much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It can take hundreds of hours sifting through what felt like random pieces to revive just one film.”

The Instagram Jigsaw Puzzle is a fully interactive experience that uses Instagram’s new Save feature. To put the puzzle together, the user has to search for, and save each piece in the correct order. Once he or she has the right order, the original image will appear in their personal Saved feed. It may seem simple, but with 21 pieces and 51,090,942,171,709,440,000 combinations, the puzzle is much harder than it seems. In fact, for the first time ever, TSFF is offering a prize for seven people who complete the puzzle.

Want to have a go? Go to @TSFF2017_puzzle to begin the puzzle.

“The Toronto Silent Film Festival continues to grow and each year the challenge is to do something on Instagram to reflect how innovative silent films were in their day,” Litzinger added. “It’s a dream creative challenge. And putting the puzzle together is actually pretty fun.”

Credits:

Client: The Toronto Silent Film Festival

Advertising Agency: Red Lion Canada
Chief Creative Officer: Matt Litzinger
Associate Creative Director: Pepe Bratanov
Senior Copywriter: Kyle Carpenter
Copywriter: Andrew Parsons
Designer: Christopher McCluskey
Client Service Director: Kaitlin Doherty
Account Supervisor: Amanda McMillan
Account Coordinator: Rebecca Damiani
Producers: Meghan Cassidy & Alisa Pellizzari

The 2016 campaign:

2015:

2014:

2013: