The archive · Public & Social · Marketing decision · 2020
Anti-Recidivism Coalition animates inmates' COVID testimony in #WeMatterToo
ARC and Imagine Justice turned phone interviews with prisoners into an animated PSA: jails without masks or distancing, told by the people inside them
Anti-Recidivism Coalition · Imagine Justice
What it had to solve
When COVID-19 hit US jails and prisons in spring 2020, people held in close quarters with little sanitation faced an outbreak risk the public barely heard about, and they could not speak for themselves on camera — filming inside prisons was impossible during lockdown.
How it works
In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 tore through US jails and prisons, the people inside them had the least ability to be heard: media access was cut, visits were suspended and the public was focused on staying home. Imagine Justice and the Anti-Recidivism Coalition set out to change that with a campaign that let incarcerated people speak first.
Because filming inside prisons was impossible, director Savanah Leaf of Park Pictures arranged phone calls through defense attorneys and recorded interviews with inmates across roughly ten states. ArtCamp animators turned those recordings into charcoal-style visuals, so the audience heard prisoners describe missing masks, sanitizer and social distancing while watching the conditions rendered on screen.
Released in May 2020, the PSA carried the line that every sentence should not be a death sentence. It anchored the broader #WeMatterToo campaign of 39 activist organizations, which highlighted outbreaks like an Ohio prison where more than 70% of inmates had tested positive and lined up dialogues with public figures including Kamala Harris and Ayanna Pressley.
Why it lands
- The inmates are the authors: their recorded voices carry the argument, so no outside narrator translates or softens what prison conditions during COVID were like.
- Animation solved the impossible shoot: with cameras barred from prisons, drawn images were the only way to put faces to testimony gathered by phone.
- The charcoal style matched the gravity of the subject, signaling testimony about life-threatening neglect rather than a cartoon.
- Tying the PSA to a campaign of 39 organizations gave a two-minute film an activist network ready to amplify it.
What it did
The film broadcast first-person inmate accounts of missing masks, sanitizer and social distancing into the pandemic debate, and the wider campaign lined up dialogues with public figures including Kamala Harris and Ayanna Pressley. Industry outlets featured the PSA, and D&AD preserved it in its awards archive.
What you can take
When the people with the story cannot be filmed, their recorded words can still carry it: animation adapts to the constraint and keeps the account first-person
Since then
The PSA circulated through the #WeMatterToo campaign's partner network and advertising-industry channels through spring 2020, and D&AD later kept it in its awards archive as an example of pandemic-era advocacy filmmaking. The format — remote recorded testimony matched with animation — became a template for telling stories that could not be filmed under COVID restrictions, and Park Pictures' relationship with the organizations continued into later social-justice work.
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