I have spent more time on the opening title and crawl than any other sequence thus far. Much of this time was spent learning new software and hunting down fonts, but I also spent (or rather, wasted) several hours thinking about color. If you examine the title shots below, you can see that there is no standard Lucas print. The colors have varied from lime yellow to light gold.
Star Wars (original)
Star Wars SE
Prequel Episodes 1-3
When it came time to make some color decisions for my title, I leaned toward EP3. In fact, I prefer using elements from EP3 whenever possible because the DVD provides the most up-to-date source for sound and digital effects. My wife also preferred the EP3 color.
However, she also wondered why I was tasking myself to choose a Lucas color. With her subtle charm, she reminded me that this is MY project. I could use any damn color I wanted. It didn't even have to be in the yellow family!
Of course! What was I thinking? I didn't have have five color choices; I actually had millions of color choices.
I eventually stumbled into the short wave-length family of colors and found a blue that we both agreed looked very sci-fi. However, we quickly determined that it also looked like the blue used in old style video games. It was a good color for the movie, Tron--but not for a Star Wars prologue.
The color I eventually developed looks very "Star Wars" to me and my wife; and probably for good reason. It is based on the same RGB values used in the title for EP3. I merely swapped the red and blue components
Star Wars purists might have issue with my decision to go blue, but I argue that the strong color departure helps to reinforce that this is a prologue to the original trilogy. Episodes 4-6 are in a completely different class (IMHO).
For those of you still downloading the Part 1 screener, this is the title crawl that awaits you. As I noted previously, there are some encoding artifacts in the AVI that do not appear in the source:
