NEW YORK CITY - Roof Studio (www.roofstudio.tv) partnered with Le Truc, the creative collective within Publicis Groupe, alongside The Condé Nast creative marketing team and Human, to create an animated short that celebrates the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker. The :60 video encapsulating the magazine’s insights and perspectives on literature, art, culture and current events, turning the pages of history, one iconic cover at a time. In addition to the :60 edit, :30 and :15 deliverables and social media cutdowns were also created.
The animations were inspired by a poetic script by The New Yorker and Le Truc, anchored around a “One Hundred Years of…” mnemonic expressing the breadth and universality of The New Yorker stories across every era of the last century. A voiceover carries a tone of intellectual curiosity, subtle irony and cultural sharpness, emblematic of the publication.
“The script isn't a single linear story, but a series of reflections on the world from a human lens that make you pause and think, laugh and cry,” elaborates Guto Terni, Roof Studio co-founder and director. “In visually translating these reflections, we chose covers that could echo the tone of each line, adding extra layers of emotion and symbolic stimulus for the viewer.”
Roof had more than 5,000 covers of The New Yorker to sort through. In a departure from traditional storyboarding, they instead embraced a more experimental approach to the narrative flow, exploring the thematic and tonal connections between each cover. The studio played with composition, positioning, scale and transitional devices to achieve the ultimate results.
“We had a blast exploring unique ways of pairing the ‘anchor’ covers with the various beats and themes expressed in the script,” Terni adds. “With each visual we chose, the emotional match had to be there — and connect to the core of what The New Yorker is.”
Beyond the script, the animations interplay with a whimsically rhythmic arrangement of “Rhapsody in Blue,” produced by music company Human.