Post Production: Adding Titles

To ensure our opening looks like an opening, it is essential to include titles. To help with this, I looked back at my my previous blog post about Art of the Title. In that blog post I had incorporated images from footage which reminded me how I liked the style of Se7ens opening titles.

Finding the right font is important. At first, this was proving a difficult task as on Final Cut to look at each font you have to individually click on each one to preview it. Fortunately we found an application called 'Font Book' in which we could look through all the fonts quickly and easily until we found one we thought would fit in with our opening. We chose 'Courier New' as it reflects a technological feel which fits in with our film as it revolves around an iPhone.

To make a title, go into the 'Effects' tab then go into 'Video generators' and then 'Text' you will then be able to type in your title and alter the font. Here is a preview of one of our titles. If you then want to reposition your title, click a box in the canvas area and select 'Image+Wireframe' this allows you to drag your title to wherever you desire it to be.

Also I feel it is important to get the right duration of each title so that the audience don't become uninterested. Therefore to change the duration, right click on the clip you would like to change and click on duration. A box will pop up, as show below which will allow you to then decide how long you want the clip to be.

Some titles were placed over the top of other clips. This is done by simply dragging your title above the selected clip.

We chose to add some effects to the text so that not all of them were completely static as with added effects our titles looked a lot more effective and interesting. To do so, firstly go into the 'Effects' tab, then into 'Video Filters' and then look through what style you would like to add. We chose to go into 'Distort' and then selected 'Earthquake' to add a disorientated feel.

To add this to your selected title drag it on top of the clip in the sequence below.

For our final title of 'iWatch', we thought that having the simple effect that the other titles wasn't effective enough in communicating to the audience what the rest of the film has in store for them. Therefore we linked in the theme of being watched and recorded into the title. As you can see below, this looks a lot more interesting. Plus we then added an effect to make the background shake.