Objective

Trade is difficult to picture. It is contracts, credit, containers, customs and data, most of it happening between institutions that never meet, and the honest diagram of it is a diagram nobody looks at twice.

Four films on four aspects of it face a second problem on top of the first. Made separately they become four unrelated explainers, and the viewer who watches two of them learns nothing from the pairing.

Creative response

Animation, illustration and original sound, for Coriolis Technologies.

• Four films. Traditional Trade, Digital Trade, Trade Finance and Strategic Trade, cut between June 2019 and March 2020
• One stage for all four. A single globe on a single starfield, so a viewer arriving at the third film already knows where they are and what the rules are
• A vocabulary that stays put. Ships, aircraft and containers for physical movement; dotted arcs for routes; gears and avatars for the people in the chain; devices for the digital layer; bar charts when the argument turns to volume
• 135 Illustrator files behind the frames, the artwork drawn rather than sourced
• Original sound. A GarageBand score alongside the edits, with the audio cut in Premiere against the picture rather than laid under it afterwards

Putting every film on the same globe is the decision that makes a series out of four commissions. The camera starts in the same place each time, so the difference between the films is the only thing moving, and the difference is the content. A viewer who watches Traditional Trade and then Digital Trade sees the same planet acquire devices and dotted data arcs, which is the entire point being made without a line of narration.

The starfield does quiet work too. Trade films default either to stock footage of real ports, which dates and costs, or to flat vector on white, which reads as a bank's onboarding video. A globe in space is neither: it is unmistakably a diagram, and it still looks like something.

Scoring it rather than licensing a track matters more in this format than it looks. An explainer's pacing is carried by its audio, and a bought track forces the cut to fit the music. Writing the score against the edit lets a beat land on the moment a route completes.

• Four films. Traditional Trade, Digital Trade, Trade Finance and Strategic Trade, cut between June 2019 and March 2020
• One stage for all four. A single globe on a single starfield, so a viewer arriving at the third film already knows where they are and what the rules are
• A vocabulary that stays put. Ships, aircraft and containers for physical movement; dotted arcs for routes; gears and avatars for the people in the chain; devices for the digital layer; bar charts when the argument turns to volume
• 135 Illustrator files behind the frames, the artwork drawn rather than sourced
• Original sound. A GarageBand score alongside the edits, with the audio cut in Premiere against the picture rather than laid under it afterwards

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The work