Trunk has created a series of beautiful teasers for the Financial Times
Alasdair + Jock like lunch, in fact they like all meals, it would appear food nourishes them. But it’s lunch that has taken centre stage the last few weeks due to a project for the Financial Times. At first our producer thought it was for an article about his magical budgeting skills. No. It was in fact much more wholesome a project; to make a set of teasers and illustrations for the acclaimed feature ‘Lunch with the FT’, an article that has been popularly carried for decades, and that features every major creative and business name you can think of. The relaxed, yet spirited interviews take place in a restaurant of the interviewee’s choice, and the bill is footed by the FT, who else? The order and receipt are then published for your deliberation, cogitation and digestion.
With an extensive archive of wonderfully candid lunches to exploit, the FT editorial team wanted to give them a fresh twist. Alasdair + Jock developed appetising little mysteries for each, revealing subtle clues through beautifully animated vignettes that reflect the humour, warmth and tangue of the interviews. With two new ones from Charlie Brooker, and Alma Deutscher, and two oldies from Jonathan Franzen (coming soon) and Nigel Farage, there was a nice mix of subject matter to call on. Chris Swaine and Marty O’Brien at Fonic created beautiful soundbeds for each, which really help contextualise the pieces, even using a snippet of Alma Deutscher’s piano work to help illustrate her story.
Producer Richard Barnett notes, “Large established media houses have a massive mine of data which remains essentially untapped. For example the Financial Times has articles stretching back over a 100 years. These teasers demonstrate how archives can be made relevant to the contemporary media conversation, whether interviews, opinion pieces, or historical articles, as history repeats itself, they often become more relevant with time. By creating visual introductions to published interviews a wider audience can be captured than could have been achieved by text alone.”
The interviews along with Jock’s wonderful illustrations were published in the FT Weekend edition, as well as online, and the teasers were successfully shared and re-tweeted on social media. The projects were created using a mixture of photoshop, flash and after effects.