As you can see throughout this topic, a title sequence can be massive undertaking. In the following, final tutorial I will do my best to take you through the typical steps of creating a title sequence. These can vary greatly, but it should give you some sense of what this kind of project entails.
Tutorial: Building and Creating a movie title sequence
1 plan your concept or concepts. In the early stages of producing a title sequence, the title designer must settle on a plan or course of action. If it helps, and it most likely will, make a storyboard to explain your planned process as thoroughly as possible. if you happen to be brought in on the project early and it would be beneficial for you to have certain shots, see whether the production team is open to you suggesting certain shots during the shoot. if not, plan for things such as stock footage and photography to help you gather your elements. if the director has something specific in mind, listen to what he or she wants and do your best to meet and exceed those expectations. sometimes they might present you with storyboards or a plan in mind; be open to it. Ultimately, no matter how good you get at this, the film’s director has final creative say on the movie (and let your director handle the battles with the studio).
2 pitch your concept, with as much detail as possible. The real way to win people over to your idea is to present the idea as clearly as possible. You might need to generate a few tests or create an animatic to illustrate your idea. Creating something on your own to help someone envision your idea is never a waste of time; it’s called sales, and it is a common business tactic creative types should do more often. the slicker and more polished your pitch piece, the more impressed your clients will be.
3 if your concept is chosen or if you have been hired and handed a concept and things are going ahead, the next step is to settle on the technical issues. technical planning is essential. Meet with the producer, director, and editor and settle on a schedule and formats for what will be delivered. settle on how you will be interacting with the director. is the director going to come to your workspace and supervise? in many cases that means that they get to watch lots of blue bars scrolling across screens. many directors are hands-on and want to supervise the process, so it’s best to plan things out so that you have something to show the director. often a director’s busy schedule won’t permit a visit to the title designer’s studio.
3Cont’d When you’re choosing the duration of your title sequence, ask the editor how long the title sequence should be. set your timeline to be a little longer than that. Title sequences are typically somewhere between 3 and 7 minutes. The thing that you want to avoid is a overlong title sequence that bores the audience. though it is an important title sequence in the history of filmmaking and to this day a favorite of mine, 1978′s superman: the movie’s title sequence goes on forever. To the point at which the soundtrack seems like it’s getting tired. title sequences that lose narrative importance will start to wear on an audience.
If it becomes the case that you must show your progress via Web posts, be careful. Why? Well, there’s no better way to look like you don’t know what you are doing than to have the director ready to view and comment on your work but then discover he can’t play the video you’ve posted on your site for him. Here’s the real snag: there are many ways for videos to be unplayable in other formats. so, say you both are on Macs; you might not have all the same codecs, and that can be difficult to diagnose remotely. Do your best to find out whether your client is going to view the video on a mac or a pC, what os they are running—basically as much information as possible. Don’t get fancy and try an untested format you aren’t comfortable with. Also, if you know that the director or producer will be watching on a different format, try your piece on that format yourself. i have on many occasions taken videos to public pCs just so that i could make sure the files would work if the client happened to view them on a pC.
If i am able, i like to meet with the director personally, bring my laptop and present the material in the best possible light. Communication with clients via emails can lead to misunderstandings. i can’t tell you how many times a vague comment in an email set me on a course that led to major confusion.
4 project-manage your work. project management can save you so much time. the best method i have found for project management is pictured here. make five folders inside a main folder for your project. Use original Art to store all provided elements from the client, so you have a path back to what you were given at the beginning of a project. When you have prepped your files, use the save As feature to save them to your photoshop folder. if a file will be imported into Ae, you should save it to this photoshop folder. save your .aep after Effects project to the Ae project folder. Render all your output to the Ae Renders folder, and after you encode a file to be posted online, save it in the posts folder. set up this folder system before you do any work on your project.
5 protect your work. Two features that are sometimes overlooked can be absolute life-savers when it comes to protecting yourself and your work. these are AE’s auto-save and increment and save. Auto-save can be found in the preferences; it has its own heading, and all you have to do is turn it on, choose a time period for auto-save to kick in, and choose the max versions of the same project you want. so, the default is 20 minutes, but that might be too long (with powerful software like Ae, you can change the world in 20 minutes), while 2 minutes will probably get on your nerves and interrupt your workflow. i usually use somewhere between 4 and 8 minutes.
Increment and save will do a save As for you and add a number to the end of the filename. i like to do this every time i begin a project in which i’ll be making changes from the last version. often i will do this at the beginning of each day on job (so, if the client wants to go back to where we were two days ago, i can call that version back up in no time). Get into the habit of using these two features; lost work can cost you entire days’ worth of time.
6 Decide on the basic movement of every title. As we have seen earlier, we are going to want the same basic movements on every title, so the hardest one is the first one. Experiment with movements and animation and decide which is the best, and use this one as a template for every title that will follow. if your client wants to have creative say at this point, bring them in, but this is a very early stage, and some clients who aren’t familiar with this process might not want to come in and discuss type animation and fonts with you at this point, so use some discretion here. When we’ve settled on the style of animation we want, we will duplicate from this one for every other title.
Another helpful decision at this stage is to trim your title to the length you need it. if your trim points are hard to read, you can use shift-Command-D to split a layer.
7 Finish the bed. the bed is the background. that might be animation, footage, photos, or many different things. if it might change, don’t render it out; use pre-Compose. When i worked on red Doors the editor provided me with an edited sequence over which the titles would be superimposed. Now, the footage that was in my Ae timeline was never going to be in the final film, it was only there for me to get my timing.
8 Get approved, and complete the sequence. in this world, the job is over when the client is happy, not when the deadline arrives. meet your deadlines, of course, but remember that there will be back and forth between you and the client side, with changes being made often in that period. typically the director will back off once she is happy with the creative aspects of your work, and then the producer will take a more active role in making sure everyone is happy with their credits and that everything looks right. i know that sounds strange but the cast and crew are concerned about how long their names are up on-screen during the title sequence, so do your best to give the audience time to read everything and give every important team member their due. names can be tough since spellcheck doesn’t exactly work with names, so check with someone on the production side that everything is correctly spelled and displayed.
9 Done-render to client spec. Keep in mind that the title sequence will have to work with other ongoing aspects of production. Keep in close contact with the producer and the editor as to exactly what they need from you to complete the film.
