For “Wowie,” one of 18 finalists chosen from about 100 entries, the emphasis was more on imagination than technique. The credits were scrawled with a Sharpie on the writhing belly and hairy limbs of that eight-minute short’s star.

“He was going to have them written on his hand, that’s where it started,” said Craig Webster, a University of Iowa graduate arts student who, with Florina Titz, directed, edited and produced the film, a love story about a “delusional postman.”

But the film’s star, Luther Bangert, whom Mr. Webster describes as a “guy who rides a unicycle” around Iowa City, turned out to have been a circus performer. Among other things, Mr. Bangert did some impressive contortions to get an abdominal shot crediting the directors of photography. The fleshy titles of “Wowie” are now in competition with the slick aerial sequence that opens the director Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” and the clever vignettes of noir buffs stepping through the pages of a detective thriller in the HBO series “Bored to Death.”

Inspiration for the competition, Ms. Pierson said, came from discussions with representatives of AIGA, the graphic artists association, in the course of a film poster contest. The festival’s programmers began talking about an award limited to movie titles but decided to include television when they realized they were all captivated by the miniature animated fable about a man in free fall over the opening titles of the AMC series “Mad Men.” (“Mad Men” was not nominated for this competition, which is limited to new works from 2009.)

The modern approach to film titles crystallized, more or less, in 1955 with “The Man With the Golden Arm.” It opened with a kind of jazz ballet in which dancing white lines, over music by Elmer Bernstein, eventually tightened into the contorted arm of a drug addict.