Case Study · Promotional Content · 2009–2019
Making the Campaign Materials That Made the Campaign.
The EPK, BTS featurettes, talent pieces, and added-value content produced across five LAIKA productions. What gets made, why each type serves a different audience, and what happens when content gives something to an audience rather than asking something of them.
5
Productions. Coraline through Missing Link.
23+
Promotional videos produced and published
4
Content categories — EPK, craft, talent, added value
1
Dedicated YouTube channel — still live and growing
Every piece of press coverage, every awards consideration, every distributor conversation, and every fan engagement starts somewhere. For a film, it usually starts with the EPK — the Electronic Press Kit. The EPK is the standard baseline of facts and details about the movie: production-approved assets, filmmaker interviews, film facts, and the core promotional materials that become the raw material of everything the campaign produces.
The EPK is largely invisible to audiences. But beyond the baseline, the question becomes: how do we draw the audience in? How do we make them aware of our movie and interested enough to want to see more? The BTS featurettes, the talent interviews, the craft deep-dives, the collaboration content — all of it was planned and created to address that need. Building that content programme across five LAIKA productions, from Coraline in 2009 through Missing Link in 2019, required understanding not just what to produce but what might help us stand out and elevate each campaign beyond the standard toolkit.
01
The EPK — Foundation of Everything
An EPK for a major studio film is the standard baseline — the foundational set of facts, details, and assets about the movie that the entire campaign draws from. It assembles production-approved photography, filmmaker interviews, film facts, and the core promotional materials that journalists, distributors, awards voters, and social teams all need as their starting point. Getting it right requires relationships with the filmmakers, editorial judgment about what the campaign needs to say, and the operational discipline to gather, approve, and organise production-accurate material under the time pressure of a film release.
Across five LAIKA productions, the EPK covered filmmaker interviews with directors, producers, and department heads; production-approved photography from stage and BTS; film facts covering production statistics, technical innovations, and creative process; talent interviews with voice cast; and the suite of promotional video assets that could be distributed to press, used on the studio's own channels, and provided to international distributors for localised campaigns.
The EPK established the baseline. Everything else we produced — the BTS featurettes, the talent pieces, the craft deep-dives, the collaboration content — was built to enhance and elevate the campaign beyond that baseline. The question we asked for every piece of additional content was the same: what might help us stand out, and what might give us an edge in a crowded marketplace?
02
Craft and BTS Featurettes — The Work Made Visible
The BTS featurette programme produced across the five productions was planned and created to address a specific need: how do we draw the audience in to be aware of our movie and be interested or engaged in wanting to see more? Each production generated multiple craft-focused videos — from intimate single-subject pieces following one prop or one puppet through its construction, to broader behind-the-scenes pieces covering the production's scale and ambition.
The discipline was selecting the right subject and the right frame — finding the moments that would genuinely amaze people and make them want to learn more. A video about Althea Crome hand-knitting Coraline's sweaters with needles the size of a human hair works because people are amazed that someone can make something so small and so detailed — it stops you in your tracks regardless of whether you know anything about stop-motion animation. A video following the construction of the ballroom dance sequence in The Boxtrolls works because it reveals the extraordinary precision behind a scene that looks effortless on screen. A video about building an ocean for Kubo and the Two Strings works because the challenge — creating something vast and natural-looking at miniature scale — is genuinely fascinating on its own terms.
Coraline · Craft
Althea Crome hand-knitted Coraline's sweaters with needles the size of a human hair — taking up to six months per garment.
©LAIKA LLC
Kubo · Craft
Creating a vast, naturalistic ocean at stop-motion scale — one of the most technically ambitious sequences in the studio's history.
©LAIKA LLC
The full craft featurette programme across all five productions is available on the LAIKA Studios YouTube channel. A selection of additional titles from the slate:
paranorman
boxtrolls
missing link
missing link
03
Talent and Promotional Pieces — The Campaign Face
Alongside the craft content, each production required talent-facing promotional pieces — filmmaker interviews that could be used across press, social, and distributor materials; voice cast pieces that connected the on-screen performances to the characters audiences were meeting; and event-based content that captured significant moments in the film's promotional journey. But beyond the functional purpose, we were also looking to show people how passionate these filmmakers and performers were about their craft. There is something genuinely amazing about watching someone light up as they talk about a passion — and that energy is what makes the difference between a usable promotional asset and a piece of content that actually moves people.
The Making Myths featurette for Kubo and the Two Strings is a strong example — filmmakers discussing the ambition and story behind the production with a visible excitement that works simultaneously as press material, social content, and distributor asset. The Inside Magic of LAIKA piece for Missing Link brings together the film's director and voice cast for a broader look at the production, and what comes through is the genuine enthusiasm these people have for the work they are doing.
Kubo · Filmmaker Interview
The creative team behind Kubo discusses the myth-making and storytelling ambition that defines the film.
©LAIKA LLC
Missing Link · Talent Piece
Travis Knight, Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana, and Zach Galifianakis on the making of Missing Link.
©LAIKA LLC
The Kubo and the Two Strings Tokyo International Film Festival screening video captures a significant international promotional moment — the film presented to a Japanese audience for a story set in feudal Japan, with the cultural resonance that carries. Event-based content of this kind serves a different purpose to studio-produced featurettes: it documents the film's place in the world rather than the world inside the studio.
Kubo · Event — Tokyo International Film Festival
Kubo and the Two Strings at the Tokyo International Film Festival — a film set in feudal Japan, presented to a Japanese audience.
©LAIKA LLC
04
Content That Gives Without Asking
The most distinctive category of content produced across the LAIKA slate was built around collaboration — and specifically, around our approach to selecting who we collaborated with. This was content that operated furthest from any conventional promotional logic: content that gave something genuine to an audience without asking anything in return. Not "watch this film." Not "this is why the film is good." Just something made with care, offered freely, to people who might appreciate it.
What we learned over time was that the authenticity of the connection mattered more than the scale of the partner. More widely unknown collaborators actually performed better than universally known ones — because the connection was authentic rather than manufactured. Understanding why is as important as the content itself, because the principle also clarifies when this approach doesn't work.
Craft Synergy — Kika Studio and Cirque du Soleil
The Halloween makeup tutorial produced with Kika Studio for ParaNorman worked because Kika's audience and LAIKA's audience overlap at a specific shared value: both care about making things by hand with extraordinary care and skill. Kika's viewers come for the craft of her transformation work. ParaNorman's world is built from the craft of stop-motion construction. The content doesn't explain that connection or ask the audience to notice it — it simply creates a space where both exist together, and trusts the audience to respond.
The Cirque du Soleil partnership for Kubo and the Two Strings worked on exactly the same logic. Nico Baixas is a hand-puppet artist who performs nightly in Cirque's KURIOS show — a performance that requires the same kind of painstaking physical precision and craft commitment that LAIKA's animators bring to every frame. When Kurios came to Portland, the studio filmed Nico and one of LAIKA's animators experiencing each other's work — a puppet artist watching an animator, an animator watching a puppet artist. The content produces itself because the connection is genuine. Two people who share a practice, recognising each other across the difference.
ParaNorman · Craft Partnership — Kika Studio
A Halloween makeup tutorial in collaboration with Kika Studio — a partnership grounded in shared craft values rather than promotional logic. Kika makes things by hand with extraordinary skill. So does LAIKA. The content follows from that.
©LAIKA LLC / Kika Studio
Fan Recognition — Make-A-Wish
The Make-A-Wish partnership is different in character to the craft synergy content. Julissa already loves Coraline. The content doesn't create that love or deepen it through new information. It acknowledges it — it says the community of people who care about these films is real, visible, and worth celebrating. There is no commercial agenda. There is no conversion goal. There is just a fan at the centre of a piece of content, meeting the character she loves, and the studio saying: you matter to us.
Coraline · Community — Make-A-Wish Partnership
Make-A-Wish Oregon and LAIKA bring Julissa's dream to life — meeting Coraline Jones in person. Content that celebrates the audience rather than selling to them.
©LAIKA LLC / Make-A-Wish Oregon
When the Principle Doesn't Hold — Hamilton
Understanding when this approach works requires understanding when it doesn't. When Hamilton came to Portland, LAIKA reached out to the cast and invited them to the Portland Art Museum's Animating Life exhibition. A bespoke poster was designed — Hamilton's iconic silhouette replaced with Kubo holding his shamisen in the air — and presented to the cast. The actors were genuinely amazed by the exhibition. Everyone enjoyed the moment.
But the content didn't land with the same resonance as the Kika or Cirque du Soleil partnerships. The reason, in retrospect, is precise: LAIKA and Hamilton share cultural status — both are prestigious, artistically ambitious, critically acclaimed — but they don't share a practice. Hamilton's devoted fanbase came to the show for Hamilton specifically. LAIKA's community came for the hand-crafted world of the films. Those audiences overlap at a level of taste, not at a level of craft. The connection was real but it wasn't grounded in something the respective audiences could recognise in themselves.
Partnerships that work
Kika Studio — hand-crafted makeup transformation. Cirque du Soleil / Nico Baixas — nightly hand-puppet performance. Make-A-Wish — genuine fan celebration. Each connected to LAIKA's audience through shared craft values or shared community membership.
Partnerships that didn't transfer
Hamilton — shared cultural prestige without shared craft practice. The audiences overlap at a level of taste, not at a level of making. Nothing wrong with the connection. Just not enough to generate content that gives something genuine to either community and triggered real engagement.
"Shared craft values produce content that works. Shared cultural status does not. The test is whether the audience of one would recognise something of themselves in the other — not just something they admire."
05
The Full Programme — LAIKA Studios on social media
The promotional video programme produced across five LAIKA productions is documented on the LAIKA Studios YouTube channel. Craft featurettes, filmmaker interviews, talent pieces, BTS content, community activations, and the studio-wide Behind the Curtain piece that covers the art and science of LAIKA's entire approach — all of it is live, publicly accessible, and a direct record of the content infrastructure built and maintained across a decade of production.
Studio-Wide · The Art and Science of LAIKA
Behind the Curtain: The Art and Science of LAIKA — a studio-wide piece covering the surprising and unpredictable creative and technical process behind the films.
©LAIKA LLC
What This demonstrates
Content production and editorial judgment across a decade of campaigns
EPK production and management — gathering, approving, and organising filmmaker interviews, production photography, film facts, and promotional assets under the time pressure of five consecutive film releases
BTS and craft featurette programme — selecting subjects and frames that serve multiple audiences simultaneously: existing fans who want craft detail, new audiences who need a point of entry, press who need usable material, and distributors who need adaptable assets
Talent and promotional video production — filmmaker interviews, voice cast pieces, and event-based content serving press, social, awards, and international distribution simultaneously
Added value content strategy — identifying craft synergy partnerships (Kika Studio, Cirque du Soleil) and community recognition content (Make-A-Wish) that build genuine audience relationship without promotional agenda
Principled decision-making about partnerships — understanding why some partnerships work (shared craft values) and why others don't transfer (shared cultural status without shared practice), and being honest about the distinction
Sustained programme across multiple productions — building and maintaining a content infrastructure that served every production in the slate rather than starting from zero each time
The Numbers
23+
Long form promotional videos produced across the slate
5
Productions. Coraline through Missing Link.
4
Content categories — EPK, craft, talent, added value