FARM REBELLION, a six-part series, is the first Disney+ original documentary series to be produced in Germany. The focus is on the innovative farm “Gut&Bösel” in Brandenburg, which is testing a radically new type of agriculture in the fight against climate change. We were tasked by megaherz to create the full motion graphics package consisting of the title sequence, logo, explainers, location titles, introductory biography collages for the main characters, cartography animations and end credits.

Together with megaherz we developed the visual language for the series and created about 15 minutes of motion graphics content.

Like with any extensive project that requires the development of a full package which is defining a visual style and tone, is flexible and covers all use cases we started out with an in-depth process on various approaches:

The original design idea for explanatory graphics talking about methods and processes enhancing agricultural techniques featured a floathing island of soil with typical vegetation you find in fields. This would have enabled us to tell all kinds of stories happing above and below ground. Introducing some magic to this route we would have used glittery fairydust to highlight effects of enhanced farming techniques to the ground.

We developed a test sequence, animating a typicall explainer to prove that the graphical idea was indeed working.

While working on the floating soil island it became clear that this approach would be super nice for explaining methods of actual farming in the field. It fails however for other tasks like introducing the main characters of the show. For this we needed to extend the graphical package to cater for more needs.

That when we took on the idea of an all natural and "working with your own hands" idea and extend that a bit to come up with a graphical package that supports biography sequence by relying on a collage like style.

While working on the more hand made, collage like designs we realized that propably it's not such a good idea to introduce semi photorealistic looking landscapes on the graphical layer. The whole show is about showing the real world in very pretty images so the use of computer generated worlds in that context is really quite questionable. 

So the inital plan of the floating soil island inside of a realistic world was scrapped alltogether and replaced with a more stylized landscape that we used for all the "map shots" when it was neccessary to give an overview over the farm and convey exact locations.

The maps were devired from LIDAR scans from the actual area and processed into a stylized looking map that could be used in a very versataile way.

It's always good to not get stuck with that one single idea, no matter how fitting it might appear. So we always try to put some true alternatives into the game. 

The alternative here was to keep all animations in a stylized table top scene adding a bit to the "realness" of the explainer sequences. It became clear pretty quick that this idea didn't have the visual vastness to tell the story of the ideas developed for future farming applying to the whole world. It was just too confined and "little" for the broadness of the story that the series is telling.

But we think it's super nice to look at anyway. So lets not hide it in our archives!

Disney+

Executive Producer: Anne Tide

Commisioning Editor: Melanie Spanl

Megaherz

Written by: Martin Tischner

Producer: Oliver Gernstl, Fidelis Mager

Exectuive Producer: Doris Dörrie

Line Producer: Christoph Menardi

Associate Producer & First Assistant Director: Esra Bonkowski

Post Production Supervisor: Florian Kohlert

Animation Director: Robert Mayer

Animation Design: Carolin Flammang

Aixsponza

Exectuive Producer: Tobias Müller

Producer: Julian Fischer

Creative Direction: Matthias Zabiegly

Creative Lead: Christian Scheck

Sequence Leads: Christian Lachenschmidt, Daniel Stacherdinger, Stefan Voigt, Tim Hilbrand

Illustrations: Paul Grabowski

Logo Design: Sebastian Onufszak

Artists: Anthea Eichstetter, Ciara Creagh-Peschau, Denis Jagodic, Jörg Fassbender, Liv Engel, Niels Träff, Petru Carvaci, Phil Amelung, Rolando Barry, Rory Hyland, Sebastian Werner, Simon Breithofer, Stephan Helbing, Tom Knaul, Vaclav Patka