The creative freedom that comes with creating trailers and titles for design conferences have established these sequences as the genre of choice for visually ambitious directors. Here are seven that kept our optic nerves tingling in 2019.

All these projects were featured in The Stash Permanent Collection in 2019 and are listed here in chronological order by publication date.
 
 
 

PAUSE FEST 2019 “A NEW HOPE”
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Maxim Chelyadnikov, creative director at LOOP in Moscow: “The only brief we got from the great team of the Pause Fest was to make a title sequence that would – to a certain extent – be a visual narrative for the whole event.

“The main challenges were to step out from our comfort zone and make something completely different, to find people we could collaborate with, and to build a pipeline to work perfectly in terms of reaching the quality we had in mind.”
 
 
 

OFFSET DUBLIN 2019
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Arice, director at Windmill Lane in Dublin, Ireland: “The brief was really more of a conversation. Bren and Lisa head up the OFFSET team and it’s an expression of trust on their part when they ask you to create the opening film.

“Initially it was all about clearing the collective mind of the team. We put together about 20 minutes of cool, trendy, current, interesting examples of motion graphics and visuals and then said ‘See that? It’s nice. We’re not doing that'”.
 
 
 

FITC TORONTO 2019 “PURE IMAGINATION”
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Mike Winkelmann (Beeple): “There was no brief beyond the theme and somehow displaying the speaker names. Other than that I had absolute complete freedom to do what I wanted and was super thankful and appreciative of that trust.

“The other side of that coin is that with total freedom comes no boundaries to help reign things in or point them in a specific direction. This can be its own challenge as you get paralyzed by the number of options you have.”
 
 
 

TEDX SYDNEY 2019 “LEGACY”
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Scott Geersen, director at Substance in Sydney, Australia: “Given TED’s belief in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world, we wanted to touch on serious issues, celebrating past achievements and simultaneously cautioning future restraint.

“As a solution to this, we chose to represent the legacy of humankind through the creation of the ultimate ark: the orbital space vessel ISS Legacy X.
 
 
 

BLEND FEST 2019
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Nick Forshee, director at Gunner in Detroit: “It was our first time making a title sequence, so the whole thing was a challenge.

“Normally our projects range between 30-60 seconds, and we get pretty comfortable treating each frame as something you’d want to hang in your house. So at our rate, four minutes would take almost three years, our deadline was nine months… eek.

“For us, this meant we would have to loosen our grip on obsessive details and lean more on storytelling. We took nearly five months to settle on this idea: ‘an island of creatures gets blended by a strange alien’.”
 
 
 

PLAYGROUNDS “THE ART DEPARTMENT”
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Director Nick DenBoer in Toronto: “The main challenge was getting all the names featured in the Art Department floor. Originally I wanted to feature every artist’s work but the list was huge and finding clever ways to incorporate everyone’s art into the scene was going to be too complicated.

“Having the room feel like an art gallery made sense and making all the video screens and sculptures was a fun and playful way to feature all the artist’s names.
 
 
 

OFFF KYIV 2019
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Directors Eugene Pylinsky and Eugene Lekh in Kyiv, Ukraine: “You spend your entire life searching. Searching for yourself, for the meaning, for the resource.

“These events unfold in the nearest future where human technology has dramatically evolved. They are now ready to step into the unknown and to send a group of their own kind on a one-way mission hundreds of light-years away.

“This is a search beyond our planet, in the endless universal fractal of an absolute resource.”