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Info: Authentic Opening Crawl for my Ep. II Edit (Shroud of the Dark Side)

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 (Edited)

Hello again- I am doing the opening crawl for my edit of Ep. II (Shroud of the Dark Side) in Adobe Illustrator (to be scrolled at a later point), but lack the proper knowledge on the relative sizes of the fonts to each other, formatting, etc. I did this crawl by first recreating the “Phantom Menace” crawl on Illustrator and comparing it to the real thing, making necessary changes until it appeared to be right. Then, I used the template to create this crawl.

http://img319.imageshack.us/img319/9858/zsw5jh.jpg

However, I know that many of you (like Darth Editous, who did the crawls for the ADigitalMan edits) already have much experience with this type of thing, and I was wondering if any one of you could give me additional formatting tips or things that I have done incorrectly. Because after reading the tutorials on theforce.net, I decided to do it without any tutorials, to begin with (as so much of the formatting and font info is wrong there). Here’s a detailed description of the formatting I used:

-The centered episode title “Episode II” is NewsGothic BT Bold, at 45 pt (and stretched horizontally to 20).
-Then, under this, I have an empty line of NewsGothic BT Bold at 5 pt
-Under this is the centered movie title in Univers LT 49 LightUltraCondensed, 88 pt. Normally I wouldn’t do this, but I compressed it (-30 horizontally) due to the length of the title.
-Under this is another blank line, this time of Univers LT 49 LightUltraCondensed at 45 pt.
-The body of the crawl is NewsGothic BT Bold at 37 pt and justified. Occasionally, I wouldn’t like the way that the lines were broken up, and so with the space bar, I nudged a word or to onto the next line to make the distribution better aesthetically. I believe that the crawl length matches that of the originals, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
-The spaces between the paragraphs are NewsGothic BT Bold at 39 pt as opposed to 37 pt

Understand that a lot of this was by eye and by simply trying to compare to the original crawl (perspective corrected). However, I know that you are all laughing to yourselves at the elementary mistakes I’ve made at this point. You would have my deepest thanks if you helped me fixed these things. Perhaps others would be able to create the opening crawl more easily with this info.

Thanks!

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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Originally posted by: Trooperman
Occasionally, I wouldn’t like the way that the lines were broken up, and so with the space bar, I nudged a word or to onto the next line to make the distribution better aesthetically.


Well, for starters, let me say I'm glad you are worrying about the word spacing, I hate uneven lines (and if I ever do my own edit of the SW films one of the first changes I will make is a new crawl with better spacing).

Now for the tip! I also used to use the space bar to manually push words to the next line of justified text, but now I know of a much simpler method. Open up the Paragraph palette in any of the recent Adobe apps, including Illustrator. Then click on that palette's contextual menu, the circular button with the right pointing triangle on the top right of most palettes. Two of the options in that menu will be 'Adobe Single-line Composer' and 'Adobe Every-line Composer'. These options decide how the program will calculate word spacing. Single-line, which you would be used to, only averages spacing for, obviously, a single-line, whereas Every-line calculates it for the entire paragraph. It usually finds the best spacing solution automatically! If you decide to switch to it, remember to delete the spaces you've already added. If in your opinion it doesn't calculate the best spacing option for a particular paragraph then you'll need to change that back to Single-line and manually space again.

I just did a quick test of your crawl, and while I likely didn't have the text box at your exact width I did end up with a satisfactory result, the same spacing as your final. In this particular case it only made the one change, the 'of' in the first sentence, but you could probably guess how much faster it is to produce books and magazines with that feature!

DVD cover designers, remember this tip also for your synopsis too!

http://www.kineticpast.com/starwars/thecheatlaserdisc.gif
Ooh, a laserdisc. The Cheat's playin' something on a laserdisc.
Everything is better on a laserdisc. Whatever happened to the laserdisc? Laserdisc!

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Gillean to the rescue again! Thanks very much sir.

And thank you for the tip about evenly formatting justified text in Illustrator- that will come in very handy in the future.

But the crawl looks authentic and correct to everyone here?

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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Trooperman, the crawl looks good.
"A Jedi can feel the force flow through him".
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Thanks, Kev.

To the guys that haven't responded, I'll take that as a...yes?? No problems that you can see?

Come on- I can't have gotten this right on the first try

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition