Responses by ROOF Studio.
Background: The ad celebrates 100 years of The New Yorker, a weekly magazine that has not only reported on history but also helped shape it through its editorial voice. The goal was to tell the magazine’s story—through a series of 700 covers in 60 seconds—and inspire people to subscribe to it.
Design thinking: We created an animation using The New Yorker covers, drawing from an archive of 5,000. We worked closely with Le Truc chief creative officer Marcos Kotlhar and his team, who shaped the narrative tone by suggesting key covers and animation directions, advancing every creative decision.
Our team approached the archive like a living organism rather than a catalog. Initially, the exploration was wide open—we didn’t have a fixed script or structure. The idea was simple: look for energy, motion and dialogue between covers. We tested combinations—letting one image pull the next—and searched for visual connections and emotional threads that could unfold naturally.
As the project evolved, we moved toward a script-led approach. The editorial voice became our compass. Now, it wasn’t just about visual beauty; it was about matching images to ideas—finding covers that could amplify, contradict or reflect each narrative beat with real emotional weight.
Challenges: We had to organize and compare 5,000 magazine covers in a visually coherent way. It wasn’t just about finding similar images—we had to understand why they were similar, taking into account color, composition, temperature and visual elements. The level of control demanded by the project for our artists required special attention to interface performance and seamless exportation to compositing software. However, the creative team had a clear vision, guiding development and technical decision-making.
Favorite details: Working with The New Yorker’s iconic and history-defining covers, to access, reframe and reorchestrate them, was a powerful experience. These images had once spoken for a single week, and now we were curating them into something larger, weaving them into a broader story that spanned time.
New lessons: Given the sheer scale of the archive, we developed a custom tool from scratch, structuring a database of all 5,000 covers to map visual and descriptive characteristics for each one: dominant colors, image temperature and key elements. This allowed us to build smart filters and search functionality based on visual similarity. It was also essential that the sequences be reviewed frame by frame, which greatly facilitated the work of the compositing and art direction teams. The tool’s interface was straightforward and accessible, integrating smoothly into the artists’ workflow; sequences could be generated and exported into compositing software with just a few clicks.
Specific project demands: The fact that we couldn’t alter the covers shaped every creative decision—how we staged the animation, built sequences and approached transitions. We had to respect the covers exactly as they were, which meant finding solutions purely through composition, scale, layering and movement inside the frame. Once we landed on a script, we had to find the right visuals for every one of its sentences. Sometimes, it meant letting a single cover hold the moment; other times, connecting two very different covers through camera movement or graphic relationships.
The emotional match had to be there, which was challenging. The constraint made the process harder and the film more precise. It forced us to make every choice with intention and remain true to the integrity of The New Yorker’s visual history.
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