Instagram Jigsaw Puzzle
Read the story- Year
- 2017
- Objective
- Engagement
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Social
- Agency
- Red Lion
Objective
The festival wanted to build buzz for its 2017 program of newly restored silent films — some screening for the first time in nearly a century — before tickets went on sale, without a media budget for a dedicated site or app. Piecing together a puzzle from scattered fragments doubled as a metaphor for film restoration itself, so Red Lion Canada built the promotion entirely inside Instagram, where the festival's audience already was.
Solution
Players find a dedicated Instagram account with a grid of 21 posts, each showing a fragment of a vintage silent-film poster shuffled out of order. There's no app to open or site to visit: working out the correct sequence and tapping Save on each post in that order is the entire game, since Instagram's Saved tab assembles a player's chosen posts into one continuous view. Get the order right and the fragments line up into the complete poster in that private feed; get it wrong and it stays a jumble. The first seven players to send in a screenshot of the correctly assembled image won a prize from the festival.
- 1
Players find out about the puzzle through festival promotion and follow it to a dedicated Instagram account, @TSFF2017_puzzle, which is the entire game — there is no app or website.
- 2
The account's grid shows 21 posts, each a fragment of a vintage silent-film poster, uploaded in scrambled, non-sequential order.
- 3
Players study the fragments, recognizing the rare silent films they reference, and work out the correct order the pieces should follow.
- 4
The core mechanic is Instagram's Save function: players tap Save on each of the 21 fragments in the sequence they've deduced, one post at a time, since save order is the only input the game accepts.
- 5
Progress and outcome both surface in the player's own Saved feed — a correct sequence reassembles into the complete poster image there, while a wrong order leaves the fragments as a jumbled mosaic.
- 6
To finish, players screenshot their assembled Saved feed and submit it to the festival; the first seven correct submissions win a prize.
