News Corp:
The Future, In Focus

Client

News CorpNew York, London, Sydney

Film

The Future, In FocusBrand film and sizzle reel

Runtime

2:01Plus a silent cut for newscorp.com

Shot

July 2025The News Building, London. 1211 Avenue of the Americas and HarperCollins, New York

Voice

Rob JellisonRecorded October 2025

Delivered

January 2026Refreshed September 2026

How do you fit more than a century of front pages, first editions, broadcasts and bestsellers into two minutes? We began at the end.

News Corp is not one brand but a constellation of them: The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, The Times and The Sun, the New York Post, HarperCollins, Realtor.com, News Corp Australia, Talk, Times Radio and Virgin Radio. In 2025 its corporate communications team put out a brief for a new sizzle reel, one film that could open an all-hands, sit on the homepage and hand to an advertiser, with every business well represented. RIOT pitched, and won, a brand manifesto rather than a highlight reel.

News Corp•Brand film•2:01•2026

Begin at the end

The structure came before a single frame. The film opens in the present, the sun rising over New York, then London, then Sydney, with four words: A new day. A shared horizon. From there it travels back to where the company began, through the archive and the presses, and returns to the same dawn with the same four words. Said once, they sound like a beginning. Said again, after everything in between, they land as a revelation.

The script went through three names on the way to that shape. We pitched it as Igniting the Future. By August it was The World in Focus. The title that stuck, The Future, In Focus, turned the lens from the world to what comes next, and the opening line we had been building toward became the ending too.

Every line, written to be said

On most sizzle reels the voiceover is the last thing added, narration laid over an edit that already exists. We wanted the words to carry this one, so we wrote the script the way you would write a poem: out loud, in the rhythm it would be read, with every line earning its place before a single frame was cut. RIOT wrote it with Grace Bennett and her team, draft by draft, trading an early we ignite for we illuminate and finding the pairs that give the middle of the film its pulse: finance and fiction, real estate and revelations, politics and pop culture.

The lines we are proudest of are the ones that fold the whole company into a breath, and each was written with a picture in mind.

Then the four words from the beginning, heard again. Every line was written to be read by a real voice, and chosen again when it was.

Three buildings, two continents

Most of the picture already existed somewhere inside News Corp: brand reels, newsroom animations, event trailers, a plant tour, archive scans, an interview with Chief Executive Robert Thomson. None of it sat in one place. The company is eighteen businesses, each with its own library and its own keepers, so before a frame was cut we held eighteen meetings, one per business, from Dow Jones and News UK to HarperCollins, Realtor.com, REA Group, News Corp Australia and the New York Post, walking each team through the concept so they could go back into their archives and pull the assets that said who they were. Then we went looking for the shots nobody had.

We shot three days in July 2025. The first was The News Building at London Bridge, from the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio at nine in the morning to Talk’s Plank of the Week after lunch, by way of Dow Jones, the HarperCollins archive, The Sun’s sports show, Times Radio, and the Sunday Times walls. Three weeks later, in New York, a crew of seven spent a Monday at HarperCollins on Broadway, in through the freight entrance on Fulton Street, and the Wednesday at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, in through the freight on West 48th at eight in the morning, for the Wall Street Journal newsroom, the Barron’s corridor and the New York Post.

The oldest thing in the film is the front page of The Daily Universal Register, dated Saturday, 1 January 1785, the paper that became The Times three years later. The newest is a podcast wall. Between them the edit runs on a rhythm the storyboard set early: cuts that move backward through the decades until they reach the first newspaper, then forward again through ink, pixels, radio and the story that sparked your curiosity.

The hard truths

A manifesto about journalism has to say what journalism costs. The film’s middle slows down for it. Behind Rob’s lines about fighting for truth even when it is difficult, we cut the Times front page from the battle for Kyiv, a journalist detained in China, and the Wall Street Journal’s own front page on the day Evan Gershkovich came home. The voices in that stretch are not ours: a news bulletin, a reporter who thought she would never get out, and News Corp Chair Lachlan Murdoch on why finding the truth is essential.

News Corp needed a voice

The script asked for a reader who could be poetic without being precious. We cast Rob Jellison and directed the session remotely in October 2025, line by line: a few different reads of a new day, a shared horizon, a more flowing cadence for the century of captured history, and a slightly different tone for each of trusted then, trusted now, trusted tomorrow. Under him runs Stephen Keech’s Beyond Boundaries, built up from stems so the swell could land on the right cut.

The other voices were already there, waiting in the assets: Robert Thomson on why what the company does matters to society, and Rupert Murdoch, Chairman Emeritus, on keeping up the fight for freedom of expression, for everybody. We placed him last, right before the film’s final idea.

That idea is a run of faces. Young and old, different continents, every one of them looking straight down the lens, cut so the eyes line up from face to face and it reads as one collective gaze. For every voice. Every story. Every generation. Then the News Corp mark draws itself on, and three words hold on white: Passionate. Principled. Purposeful.

A new day, a shared horizon

The reel was delivered in January 2026 at 4K. In September, News Corp asked for two more cuts: a refreshed main edit for a changed roster of brands, and a silent version for the top of newscorp.com that reaches the company’s name within seconds and carries subtitles for the few lines of speech. The structure held. Begin at the end, and the ending is always ready for a new day.

ServicesCreative Direction·Concept Development·Brand Storytelling·Scripting·Film Production·Branded Content·Editing·Motion Graphics·Color Grading·Voiceover Recording·Music Supervision·Sound Design