Created for this year’s edition of the Toca Me design conference, Timo Boese’s title sequence gracefully combines RED One Mysterium X studio shot still life with subtle 3D animations, for an elegant ‘classic meets modern’ introduction to the artists associated with the event.

Here’s the making of:

This is actually Boese’s second Toca Me commission, his first being a sequence he created for the 2004 edition of the festival.

After getting stuck into research about the beginnings of Motion Design, which invariably lead them to the history of the opening title, Berlin Motion Design students at the BTK (Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule) Nora Thoes and Damian Pérez selected over 100 film examples of title design which they compared and contrasted to demonstrate how the craft has progressed over the decades. The pair structured their analysis around a set of key questions:

Once the analysis stage was complete, a grid was constructed within After Effects to house the film clips and the voiceover text that walks us through the history was written and recorded, a process that all in all took two months.

Here are some shots of their working desktops that Thoes and Pérez were kind enough to share with DN:

Due to the tight deadline the team only had a single day to first test, then shoot their storyboarded shots. Magnets were placed beneath a petri dish containing the magnetic liquid and used to manipulate its movement along with hospital syringes which added the ability to blow or suck the fluid into position. All this was shot on a Red Epic sporting a 200mm lens and running at 100fps in 4k. Post (editing/vfx/animation) took a week, during which time Ekker concentrated on creating seamless cuts for a fluid (no pun intended) montage which worked well with the chosen typography.

Note:  Ekker points out that the music in this video is not in the real film, it’s used for practice.

And here’s a trailer for MEDI which will hopefully make its way online in the not too distant future:

The animated sequence is a journey through time and space, transcending the ancient Zoetrope concept which stems from pre-Christian Chinese culture to our modern global society. A band lives the American Dream, symbolizing the ascent of a basement musician to stardom across the horizontal zoetrope layers. They move from the underground scene to stardom with the help of their fans and social networks, finally reach the top of the carousel and perform at the MTV EMA.

You can see how the team worked with a mix of Cinema 4D, After Effects, Maxwell Render and Sculptris to created the realistic look of the piece in this making of:

Once, When We Were Young see’s Chiu hit his title hat-trick for OFFF following 2007′s New York titles:

and 2008′s Lisbon titles:

Brosmind and Upper First redefined the format, mixing cinema, illustration and 2D/3D animation with paper, adding to their highly anticipated video a double-feature comic book that was given for free, alongside plastic masks with the face of the characters, to a crowd that enjoyed all the presentation feeling that they were the real protagonists of the party.

I believe a making of video will surface at some point, but for now you can goggle over behind the scenes pictures after the jump.

Oh, and least you believe that OFFF titles only step up when they hit the Spanish boarder, take a look at Physalia’s Pescara and Hellohikimori’s Istanbul titles too:

In case you’re scratching your head in a vain hunt for titles, you can admit defeat and read the clip list, we won’t think any less of you. Also, if some of your favourite gems seem strangely absent, Alex has some pretty bulletproof reasons as to why that’s the case:

“There are a few omissions in this year-end anthology. Missing films include:
- Abduction, because fuck that movie.
- Jack & Jill, because fuck that movie.
- Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked, Mars Needs Moms, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Bucky Larson, Atlas Shrugged: Part I, and I Don’t Know How She Does It, for similar reasons.
- Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, Glee: The 3D Concert Movie, and The Human Centipede 2, because I edited this in a public place and people would’ve looked at me funny.
- No Strings Attached, because the video had this weird green line at the bottom and I didn’t care for it.
- Win Win, The Sitter, and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, because I found nothing visually striking in their trailers.
- Arthur Christmas, Jumping the Broom, Something Borrowed, and Gnomeo and Juliet, because I was struck by an incredible apathy towards all of them.”

It seems that a project of this scope can’t help but leave behind a little detritus, so Alex got back to work giving title sequences their due and put together Insert Title Here too.