This film looks to shed light on the rigor behind journalism and why it's all worth it. It’s a piece of work about pursuing the truth wherever it may lead and bringing that truth back in word form for the world to read. This 30-second film shows the rigor of an 18-month investigation by three NYT journalists into Donald Trump’s dubious tax schemes during the 1990s. After following an unfathomable paper trail, they revealed he had taken part in possible fraud and other misdemeanors. The spot was released at a time of overwhelming information (and misinformation), making it even more critical to reiterate the importance of the truth and the value of NYT journalism

The film launched after Trump said the press was the “enemy of the people” following a meeting between himself and The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. The script had to put us in the reporters’ streams of consciousness, adopting their tones of voice while also maintaining The Times’s inimitable house style. The script, a connected thread of words that appears on screen, creating the effect of a continuously rewriting headline, was central to putting the viewer in the psyches of the journalists as they picked their way through an unfathomable amount of information, unravelling the financial history, decade by decade, of America’s largest real estate empire.

The film’s art direction is centered around a unique typographic treatment of continuously rewriting headlines paired with emotive mixed media and found footage. By using this headline construct and supporting it with this real footage from the reporting, we were able to put viewers in the shoes of the journalists as they worked, making them experience all the fears, doubts and triumphs that go into reporting a Times story. In this way, the art direction sharply brought to life the world of the Trumps’ suspect tax past, and the resulting film felt fresh and cutting given the current conversations around power, governance and accountability.