Speakeasy was commissioned to produce an opening film for Newton’s 2017 annual conference entitled: ‘From Fake News to Artificial Intelligence’, exploring the opportunities – and threats – for the investment community around media manipulation and AI technologies.

The film had to engage the audience from the outset, it had to cause a stir and immediately capture the delegates’ imagination, and attention.  Taking inspiration from electronic music and comedy duo – Cassetteboy’s – ‘cut-up’ viral video series, we created a gritty, deeply satirical film cut from genuine broadcast reports featuring world leaders and technology billionaires.

Presented as an authentic public broadcast transmission, the film creatively intercut excerpts from keynote speeches and interviews featuring Theresa May, Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Jeremy Corbyn, Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jack Ma, Jeff Bezos, Vladimir Putin, Jacob Zuma – to create an alternative (fake) speech.  This was augmented by ‘fake’ news captions and surreal compositions featuring emoticons, digital interference static and graphical typographical headlines.

All these motifs combined to deliver an expressionistic, surreal and darkly comic event opener.