Celebrating stories from the South

Netflix has established itself in India as the ultimate destination for telling stories that matter. With their commitment to telling more local stories in Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada than ever before, Netflix wanted to announce their presence in South India in a big way and position themselves as the place for great, homegrown South Indian stories.

How could Netflix get this message across while also thanking and celebrating the diverse cultures of the south?‍

‍Stand up for the new anthem

Our big idea for Netflix was Namma Stories – an anthemic music video featuring 4 prominent South Indian artists; Ariv U, Siri, Humankind, Niraj Madhav; performing in their respective languages about the contributions of their region to art and culture, all woven together seamlessly to create a sense of storytelling from across different parts of the South.

‍The process behind the madness

To give a sense of personal tales being told, we extensively researched each artist’s background, their culture and specific stories that they wanted to tell. 

Our aim was to understand each artist’s words and present them in a manner that highlighted their individual styles, environment and language, while still being a part of the same music video.

We came up with a different visual theme for each artist rooted in the same celebration of local storytelling. Local inspirations and influences were added to each setup which reflected that region’s proud storytelling traditions. Like gossip as a part of oral storytelling culture at local addas of Karnataka, fusion of the western world and south India and different art styles coming to life. We came up with 4-5 treatment options for each of them.

The intent was to create visuals that felt unique & stylized yet incredibly intimate & relatable. Authentic storytelling was our strategy and we were able to achieve that with the backing of visuals and the experiences the artist put forward in the music video.