Illustrator is probably not a bad idea once you know how to format everything. I did it inside After Effects just so I could tilt and edit the text on top of the real crawl and line everything up.
So, specifics. My text is in a separate 4K composition where I do all the movement (excluding gate weave, getting to that later) and fading of the text. Apparently my focal length is 50mm. Don’t know how I ended up with that number, but it works. Although I have to stretch the text layer about 200%. Maybe 23mm and no stretch works just as well, but this is what I ended up with. 36mm film. Aperture 25,5.
The angle is -79,8 (for matching the TFA crawl). Since this composition is where I edit the text I also keep a guideline layer to see how wide the paragraphs should be. And on the text layer I have a bunch of effects. A yellow Glow, to make the text a tiny bit thicker. And then a Refine Hard Matte which makes it a bit thicker again and smudges out some details when it goes blurry in the distance. And then a 0,5% Camera Lens Blur which doesn’t do much. And then a Set Matte which adds that little gradient fade in the distance of the text. A Simple Choker which makes the edges a bit less soft and more contrasty. A soft red Drop Shadow which makes the edges of the text warm and cozy. And finally a Fast Blur that just softens everything a bit. Now, all this may sound like nitpicking (and it is), but have a look at this with/without effects image and you can see it’s not completely pointless: https://i.imgur.com/SvKgO9O.jpg
And then on to the composition where I put everything together. I scale down the text layer to 50%. And then for the gate weave I put a Transform effect on the layer (you could use the built in Transform property, but this way it’s easy to turn on or off). Alt-click the stopwatch for Position and type in the expression: wiggle(6,0.5). This gives the text a slight jittery motion. Aaaand that’s it. Sprinkle some film grain on top if you want.
I thought it was Fake News Gothic.
It’s real. The News, the Gothic. All of it.