I made the crawl for Hal 9000’s TFA: Restructured v2 in After Effects. As you may or may not know, the real crawl for TFA was also made in After Effects.
Here’s the crawl I made next to the original crawl:
https://i.imgur.com/3KBqQuu.pngBasically what I did was make a tilted text layer in 3D space that’s filmed with a virtual camera. I did all the text formatting inside After Effects. The title is set in News Gothic Bold Extra Condensed and the rest of the text is in News Gothic Bold. The prequels used Univers Ultra Condensed for the title.
One thing that helps is to animate the text layer at twice the resolution (as a separate composition) and then scale it down, this makes everything look and move smoother. These things are the easy parts, then there are a lot of little details that give the right look to it. The original trilogy crawls were made by actually filming letters with a camera, and the sequel trilogy crawls were made in After Effects with the goal of looking like they were actually filmed. The prequel trilogy crawls are a bit more “perfect” and digital, but still have the depth of field effect. If you want a more retro look like the OT and ST, you’d want to get the right depth of field and add some gate weave as well as effects that get the right look of the text itself, perhaps some film grain too. I have seven effects just on the text to get the right softness and look of the depth of field.
I could send you a template, or just describe things in more detail if you’d like.
Thanks Ridley.
I’ve been basing it off TFA too, oddly enough. Although it wasn’t until recently when I lined them up that I realized how far off they were. I didn’t know they did theirs in AE, though I figured that might be the case, which is kinda what’s making me think I shouldn’t not be able to line it up perfectly (although close enough would be fine)
We have a similar technique. In fact, if anything, the only real difference is I’ve made all the text in Adobe Illustrator, which I think helps, being able to separate it and just look at the text only without the effects.
I am curious though the specifics you use. I’d been under the impression that the focal length for the crawl was 24mm, but I’ve just recently noticed that 23mm might be closer to it. I haven’t played at all with DOF or put effects on it or anything (besides some homemade gate weave, although even on that I wonder how you did it). I also had the text at -70 x rotation but it seems that might even be a bit off. So yeah, curious to hear your specifics.
And also, it’s news gothic? Damn, I’d read somewhere awhile ago that it was franklin, I guess they lead me astray.