Credit Mock-up - Elliott

Here is a mock-up I have made for the end credits and title card sequence for our short film. It isn't the final idea yet but, as well as helping me get back into editing, it helps give an idea of what the credits may look like.



The awful drawings do seem to go well with the opening to Se7en,
so that's something.

Unfortunately, to help better tie in the film with the promotional poster I want to use the same photos of our actors in each. This means that until my group gets together to make the assets, I have had to bust out my 'mad-1' art skills and use some weird/creepy drawings as placeholders. They would probably fit right into some horror film about a mentally-challenged artist, but don't quite cut it for our film.

Although the use of my art degree was nice it did make it quite hard to gauge what the final piece would look like, despite finding the mock-up very useful for developing ideas. It also helped me to find 'bugs' such as this insanely annoying one that made the whole video jump around like a Jack Russel on meth.


There was no cause or reason for this glitch out and the only solution was to move to a different editing software and start all over again (First problem I have ever had with Sony Vegas 11.)

The audio can be found here and is from a very small Youtuber I know who does not mind anyone using his music yet produces some very good stuff. I picked it because, with some alteration, it started to sound like the music that is often used for the credits in recent action movies (the new Die Hard in particular) and because the somber start seems to compliment the ending shots of our film.

The black on white credits will also lend a great effect to the piece, contrasting it to the many that use the standard white on black slow crawl. When looking for a good credit font I also received some great advice about this from a VFX expert on one of the better film-making websites saying:

If white is to be seen over a large area, like a white background instead of a black background, or a large dominent shape is white, then bring it all the way down to around 75%. Yes, indeed, the big "white" bar on NTSC color bars is actually only 75%! 75% looks slightly gray on a computer screen, but quite pleasing (not blaring) on a video or film screen, when it is the dominant color.  

 I was unsure about this at first because the off-white colour looks pretty bad on a laptop screen but after watching back on a TV it turned out to be great advice, the brightness is not as annoying or uncomfortable as with a large amount of pure-white light and that way makes the credits much easier to read.

Thanks to Red Giant for their Unmult plugin which I used excessively when making this.