About This Project
Koala created a cinematic TV commercial for Our Missing Hearts, the powerful novel by bestselling author Celeste Ng, published by Penguin Random House. Building on the legacy of Little Fires Everywhere, which became a global TV phenomenon, this campaign was designed to match the novel’s emotional weight with a visually rich and atmospheric trailer. We crafted a mixed media concept using stock footage, animation and visual effects to deliver a haunting and poetic commercial without shooting a single frame of live action.
The creative was shaped to feel like a high end book trailer with filmic intensity. Carefully curated stock imagery was layered with animation, kinetic typography and double exposure techniques to explore themes of surveillance, loss, protest and connection. Faces faded into cityscapes, ink bled into archival textures and symbolic objects floated through fractured compositions. These visuals were timed to a cinematic soundscape and a thoughtful voiceover that carried viewers into the world of Our Missing Hearts.
To capture the emotional complexity of Celeste Ng’s story, we used advanced compositing and VFX to give the piece depth and movement. Every scene was built to reflect the novel’s mood of quiet tension and resistance. Through subtle layering and motion design, the final commercial felt fluid and immersive. The use of double exposure gave the campaign a dreamlike quality that echoed the structure of memory and the fragility of freedom explored in the book.
The campaign was delivered across television, YouTube prerolls, social media and online retail platforms, with variations created for vertical and square formats. Shorter edits were built for Instagram stories and promotional cutdowns, while the hero trailer served as a central brand asset for launch. With its cinematic visual identity and refined pacing, the campaign helped introduce Our Missing Hearts to a wide literary audience and positioned it as a thought provoking and timely novel.
This project showcases Koala’s expertise in creating book launch campaigns using stock footage, animation and visual effects to achieve high impact storytelling. Without needing to film original content, we delivered a TV commercial that matched the tone and quality of a premium drama trailer.
