For the prequel trilogy, the opening roll-up has become a personal tradition for Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll, who has executed the crawls for Episodes I, II and now III on his home computer.

"I type the text in Illustrator," describes Knoll. "I then get a layout approval from George [Lucas], regarding where the line breaks are -- he really cares about the typography." At this stage, the text is a rectangular block -- just flat art. Knoll then imports the Illustrator eps file into a program called form·Z, which turns it into a piece of geometry that can be used in a 3-D program.

"Then I import that into Electric Image and render it. I'm not rendering it with lighting or anything; it's only going through the 3-D program to get the correct perspective." As documented in this article, Knoll researched the original trilogy roll-ups extensively before tackling the opening text for The Phantom Menace. "George was very concerned that we match the one from Episode IV very closely, that the focal length be the same and where the lines converge be the same," he says. Asking sources at Skywalker Ranch for information about the fonts used, he was dismayed to find out accurate records were not kept.

"It turned out that there were all kinds of different versions of the first crawl: the original, the Episode IV release, and all the foreign language versions." Faced with contradictory information, Knoll took a film still of the crawl and reverse-engineered it. He scanned the perspective-titled text into Electric Image, and projected it out as a flattened block of text seen from above. He then took that image to the Art Department, whose typography experts were able to identify the different fonts used within the crawl: news gothic bold for the main body of the crawl and Episode number, and univers light ultra condensed for the title of the film.