Uncovering The New Yorker's 100-Year Legacy

Ninety seconds to encapsulate a century of history. That was the mighty task facing the team behind Everything Covered – 100 Years of The New Yorker, the magazine’s first-ever video campaign marking its 100th anniversary.

The project was a collaboration between Condé Nast’s creative marketing team, agency Le Truc, animation studio Roof, and music studio HUMAN – a collective effort to celebrate The New Yorker’s legacy by weaving nearly 700 of its iconic covers into a single film.

Speaking with Marcos Kotlhar, partner and chief creative officer at Le Truc, he tells me it all started with a desire to capture the magazine’s impact on culture in a new medium. “We explored several concepts,” he says, “but we quickly realised that we had to try to harness the incredible power of the magazine’s most distinctive element: its iconic covers.”

With over 5,000 covers to choose from, the curation process quickly became a creative quest of its own. Guto Terni, co-founder and director of Roof Studio, describes the process as “equal parts intuitive play and rigorous method.” They began by taking “deep breaths and baby steps,” says Marcos. They did an initial pass to pick the essential covers they simply knew they had to feature, then shuffled and reshuffled that core set to craft a narrative arc. After that, came the painstaking task of combing the archives for hundreds more covers to serve as transitions – using a stop-motion technique to infuse energy into the edit and showcase the incredible volume of covers published over the years.

It was a far from linear process. “Of course, it was filled with serendipity,” Marcos tells me. Even after sections were “locked,” the team would stumble on another amazing cover and decide to re-edit the sequence to include it. Guto and his animation crew (a team of about 15 animators at Roof) then brought these static images to life. “In a time of AI, it’s sort of lovely to see animation pretty much crafted by hand,” says Marcos.

While the visuals were taking shape, another vital layer was the story and voice. The New Yorker’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick, personally collaborated on the script, lending his editorial insight. Marcos recalls feeling intimidated presenting a draft to David, “it’s not every day that your client is a Pulitzer-winning writer,” he jokes. But that close collaboration with David, his editors, and Condé Nast’s marketing team was essential to perfectly capture the entirely distinctive tone of the magazine.

The voiceover was provided by Jia Tolentino, one of The New Yorker’s staff writers, whose performance brought “power and freshness to the film.” It was a choice Marcos loved, “In a film about legacy, we used one of their younger staff writers – immediately making the piece about the future as much as it is about the past.”

The musical score had to complement all of these elements, without overpowering them. The team gravitated toward George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue – a composition as synonymous with New York City as The New Yorker itself, and serendipitously also celebrating its 100th year. Guto explains that there were so many "main characters" in the film – the covers, the voice-over, the animation – that "the score had to claim its own space without crowding the others."

HUMAN, the project’s music partner, experimented with different interpretations of the jazz classic. An early cut with a full orchestra was "beautiful, but it filled every inch of the frame, leaving the visuals gasping for air," Guto recalls. Swinging to the opposite extreme, a solo piano version left the city’s soundtrack feeling flat – "the connective tissue gone."

Eventually, the team found an arrangement that worked. "The sweet spot emerged when we allowed the piece to breathe," Guto tells me, describing how the pianist riffed loosely to picture while subtle ambient layers added a human pulse. Marcos calls the music choice "another act of serendipity". With Rhapsody in Blue having just entered the public domain at 100 years old, it felt meant to be. But still, it took refinement. "It was only when we decided to abandon the score and use the song almost as sound design to punctuate the animation that it felt like we unlocked something special," says Marcos.

The film’s narrative content sweeps through an abundance of major cultural and societal moments of the past century, as reflected on those covers. The New Yorker’s unique breadth was a guiding light throughout. "We wanted to accurately represent the wide spectrum of everything covered by The New Yorker," Marcos tells me.

He adds, "Not sure there’s another place where a cartoon can sit comfortably next to an essay on geopolitics or a short story by a Nobel laureate. This broad range – delivered with depth – is what makes the magazine so distinct and so important in helping its readers understand the world.

"One of my favourite things about the film is how we were able to place a cover from the 1930s right next to one from today – and another from the ’80s – and have them all feel like they belong together, seamlessly."

Just as important was preserving the integrity of each cover artwork. "Just to be clear: no cover was altered in any way," says Marcos. "The animation only had to give the drawings a pulse – never change them," adds Guto.

After months of work, the final film is one that both creators hold close to their hearts. "It’s hard to express what this project meant," Marcos tells me. "Beyond being a fan and subscriber for years, having the chance to tell The New Yorker’s story on the year of its centennial – using covers from artists that have been my heroes – is pretty hard to beat." For Guto, the experience was extraordinary. He spent a decade living in New York, where he saw The New Yorker everywhere – "on subway laps, in corner delis, stacked in waiting rooms." So being able to reimagine those covers felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Every frame, every brushstroke of a cover, and every note of the score were chosen with a deep respect for what The New Yorker represents. And for that, The New Yorker’s first dip into video exceeds marketing, becoming something closer to an animated museum of 20th and 21st century culture. Both a celebration and an invitation to champion the journalism that doesn’t just cover everything, but helps us understand it.