Making Animations Personal Uber Eck on how they turned speakers into characters for the TOCA ME 20 Titles.

Every year, the TOCA ME design conference draws some of the most inventive minds in art and design together to hear presentations by international leaders in creativity. One of the event’s highlights is the opening title sequence, which is created by a studio chosen by TOCA ME organizers.

Munich-based animation studio Uber Eck was tapped in 2020 to create the titles for TOCA ME 20. Given complete creative freedom, the team used a combination of Cinema 4D, Houdini and After Effects to make an artful sequence that set the tone for the day. “The style, design and concept were completely up to us,” recalls Niklaus Hofer, one of three directors at Uber Eck. The only requirement was that the speakers’ names had to be included.

Working with such a freeform brief inspired Uber Eck to depart from their usual approach. Rather than having one creative lead, Hofer teamed up with the studio’s other two directors, Tobias Alt, and Sebastian Schmidt, so that each of them could contribute their own ideas in truly collaborative way.

The effort began with a lengthy R&D phase. Hofer, Alt and Schmidt spent about six weeks developing ideas and pitching them to each other. Out of that process, a concept for the completed piece started to emerge, with Uber Eck visualizing the many ways TOCA ME’s speakers might influence one another as each person processed creative input and passed it on as a new artistic piece. “We decided to represent the speakers as different characters, each living in their own world,” Hofer says, explaining that the characters get interrupted by something that gets passed along, much like the microphone during the conference.

The visuals are meant to allude to each speaker's style without depicting them explicitly or mimicking their work. The titles open with a page being laid out in three-dimensional space as graphic designer Ariane Spanier’s name appears on screen. The paper wafts its way into the next scene where it is converted into a flurry of tiny dots that travel along straight lines in front of a background with a glowing array of squares, as grid-based design pioneer Christoph Grunberger is introduced.

“I don’t know if everybody felt that we matched their personalities perfectly, but we didn’t get any complaints,” Hofer says. “It was actually one of the funniest parts of the process, as our summaries of their personalities were solely based on our creepy internet stalking.” For example, they learned from an Instagram that Brendan Dawes prefers tea over beer, so his character spits out a teacup, which goes to Erik Kessels, who is depicted as “a flippy-floppy, smoky, wobbly guy.”

The creative challenge was reversed when the Uber Eck team had to come up with characters to represent themselves. They opted for a trio of throwback Mac computers that seem to malfunction until one of them starts trembling and spits out an old-school floppy disk. “We thought out characters should be computers because of the nerdy nature of what we do all day,” Hofer says, adding that the chose old Macs because “we feel kind of old already.”

One of the main technical challenges Uber Eck faced was managing the elements required for a large number of very different scenes, as well as developing organic transitions between each one. Timing was key, so they split everything that was important for the respective animations into individual layers so that scenes could be played back smoothly. “What really helped was C4D timeline, which was very responsive and could continuously zoom and move more keyframes,” Hofer says.

Watch the Making Of Video here.

Cinema 4D’s Convert Spline to Joints command was a key shortcut for setting up rigs, like the sinuous, fragmented sculpture that breaks apart and recreates itself for new media artist and choreographer Christian Mio Loclair, and the red cephalopod that swims around behind Japanese illustrator Yuko Shimizu’s name. While they often find simulation to be the right way to go for animation, Hofer says the studio has learned over time that hand animation can sometimes be better. “The convert spline to joints command has given us a lot of freedom to design things in C4D that can be made into a rigged and animated character in just a few clicks.”

Uber Eck waited until close to the end of the project to make a key decision about typography. With the animation nearly complete, they tried laying different fonts over the visuals. One of their favorites was big and bold, but they realized it obscured too much of what they’d worked so hard to create. “So, we took a more subtle approach in the final version and added some love in the small animations for each speaker individually,” Hofer says.

Uber Eck showed the title sequence to the TOCA Me organizers just two days before the conference. The client loved the work, and Hofer, Alt and Schmidt were thrilled to be presenting what they had created at such a prestigious design conference. “It was a longtime dream come true for us,” Hofer says, “and we felt obliged to really give it our best shot.”