Planning out events, trailers, and other promotional materials that capture the world of the work and its characters can be easier for films in genres such as action, science fiction, and animation. However, stories like The Parades revolve around profound, human drama and don’t include flashy effects or animation, so it is difficult to create promotional materials that go beyond cast interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and other such content.

So, we decided to focus on the universal “things left unfinished in life” theme of our film, and created a documentary featuring 13 individuals that looks at how their perspectives changed after watching the film.

The documentary captures the changing emotions and thoughts of various people, which allows us to highlight the power of the film, and the content could even reach people who were previously uninterested in seeing it.

One of the most effective ways to describe and promote a product or service is to compare people who have experienced it with those who have not.

This method is often used for advertising health foods and other such products with before-and-after imagery and other comparisons, but we decided to use it here to promote our film.

We captured how people’s worldviews changed after they watched The Parades, thereby demonstrating the impact the film has on people. Our aim was to create thoroughly realistic, trustworthy promotional material by producing it in documentary form rather than as commercial video.

Thus far, we have had more than two million views on social media, with some comments calling it as moving as the film itself, if not more.

Documentaries featuring interviews with ordinary people are quite popular in Japan, as is evidenced by the popularity of one YouTube channel that has almost 1.5 million subscribers and mainly shows on-the-street interviews.

However, the rise in popularity of shorter videos means that younger generations are less likely to watch long-form documentaries from start to finish.

That is why Netflix wanted promotional material that appealed to all generations by communicating the universality of the themes addressed in The Parades, and by illustrating the breadth of the story, which features characters of all ages, genders, and occupations.

That led to the creation of this promotional material tailored to recent Japanese social media demand and featuring interviews with multiple people presented individually in featurettes one to two minutes in length.

The documentary features interviews with 11 ordinary people and two actors, and was released in two formats: individual films one to two minutes long, and a full version with highlights selected from all of the interviews.

The different versions have been viewed more than two million times on X, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms, and that number continues to grow.

We believe that this promotional documentary helped The Parades achieve the success it has, ranking in the top 10 Japanese films after its worldwide release on 29 February 2024 for 22 days, and even holding the number one spot for nine days.