IMF Annual Report 2022 Promotional Series

How do you fit an entire year’s worth of work for an audience speaking seven languages … in a 30-second video?

For the IMF the answer was, fittingly, by being economical.

The IMF’s Annual Report is a publication documenting each year of activity for the Fund. To create a video promoting its release, our task was to translate the scope of our intergovernmental macroeconomic organization spanning 190 member countries for a video audience with actively scrolling thumbs.

We took a cue from the report itself, which was structured based on ‘themes’ – or areas of work where the Fund is actively assisting its membership to address: climate change, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, equitable recover, gender gaps, and rising debt.

Turning the original commission into a series allowed us to create more focused, feed-friendly videos, each tackling a single theme using the most striking proprietary and agency photojournalism to tell the story. Building on the motif of photography, we used the shutter effect to refresh successive images. Each shutter click would clear the way for the messaging to be told in a new language; Chinese, Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese – all languages encapsulate the diversity of the institution.

The mounting speed of the edit and musical tempo works to build momentum and convey the sense of urgency behind each theme. Together with the human-centric photography and the internationalized text, we were able to tell a story about the world, to the world.