A good opening title sequence doesn’t just preface a narrative. It’s a mini story unto itself. If anyone understands the power of a few minutes, it’s Raoul Marks. As the Emmy-winning animator behind the opening sequence for True Detective and our very own WXD conference, Marks is a skilled craftsman of immersive cinematic snippets. His most recent work, for Australia’s Semi-Permanent conference, is no exception.

The opening sequence, which plays before the start of each day at Semi-Permanent, is like a three-minute journey into deep space. We follow an astronaut as she floats through the starry abyss of our universe, on what might best be described as an intergalactic search for creativity.

Marks has designed this world in Cinema 4D to stunning effect. Photorealistic detail is built into almost every aspect of the animation: the gears as they turn on the spacecraft, the subtle flapping of the astronaut’s suit as she flies through space, the textured crevices of a moon-like planet.

The action feels at once familiar and totally surreal, almost like a love child between the hyper-CGI world of Gravity and the classic sci-fi films Marks references as his inspiration. It’s a deliberate tension, he says. “It’s supposed to feel a little odd, a little confusing,” Marks says, adding that the subtle slow-motion effect adds to the feeling of disorientation.

Like Mark’s other projects, his work for Semi-Permanent has an air of mysticism, a slight but not full detachment from reality. It’s meant in some ways to be a metaphor for the creative process—“It can be isolating,” Marks says. “I was interested in the creator as being a loner.” And fair enough. Marks’s title sequence is mesmerizing, in no small part because of the profundity it conveys.

And it doesn’t hurt that space looks cool as hell.