Louie the Lion

How do you tell the story of a 200 year old organization that underwent a rebrand and who also deals with an incredibly sensitive and logistically difficult fact of life? Well you do it through a stuffed lion that you name Louie, of course!

Shot 1 of the piece in storyboard form

When NewPath Child and Family Solutions approached us asking to effectively tell their story of hope, we knew we were right in our wheelhouse. We tend to excel at emotionally driven pieces where we get to show how much we wear our hearts on our sleeves. There is something about creating emotion in people from our content that just really moves us. We knew that showing raw emotion on a kids face might be a little too much for some audiences, and the original thought that we couldn’t show one of their children’s’ faces stuck in our brain, so after a 45 minute brainstorm we settled on telling the story through a stuffed lion named Louie.

After obtaining numerous Louie’s with varying expressions and writing the poem that would become the VO of the piece, we headed to production. Filming in only two full days of production, we were able to draw out the emotion we aimed for when we first pitched Louie the Lion.

Louie the Lion not only reached the hearts of the audience, but reached heart of numerous judges. To date, Louie has won us HMCo a total of 11 awards. 4 Cincinnati Gold Addys, 1 Cincinnati Judge’s Choice Addy, 3 District Addys including one Gold, 1 Silver Nation Addy, 1 Gold National Addy, 2 Gold Telly Awards, and one Ohio Valley Regional Emmy.