When what’s “real” is debated every day – from politics, to climate change, economics, even the nature of the universe – how can we shape, challenge or change our reality… and understand who we are within it?

On a more down-to-earth level, how can we sum up the TEDx Sydney 2020 theme of REAL, with so many permutations and interpretations conjured by the word?

In the past, TEDx title sequences have aimed to provoke thought by holding a mirror to the state of society: reflection as catalyst for change. For TEDx2020, we returned to the spirit of playfulness. Instead of the serious, the sincere.

Instead of a mirror, a dream.

Happily, at our invitation this dream was shared by some of the world's best motion and sound studios. After all, TEDx is about ideas worth spreading, and with "reality" so open to interpretation, a curated global collaboration was perfectly suited to capturing the kaleidoscopic nature of the theme - with the additional benefit of strategically positioning TEDx Sydney firmly on the global stage.

Each studio contributed their own unique vision of reality, with the resulting diversity of concept and style supporting reality's elastic nature. Seen together, animations combine to illustrate the complexity of the real more completely than any could achieve alone.

Woven together to form the opening titles, animations meld with the poetic glue of narrative: a story of hope, passed down from mother to child, wherein we seek to reconcile a black-and-white reality with the dream of a more colourful world.