Post-Production (Titles): Opening Credits

For our short film, we have decided to include the ability to use Adobe After Effects for our titles as well as Adobe Premiere Pro to edit. Firstly for our titles, we chose to include them to match into the setting of the film as this made our film more professional. I found that in my AS levels, the use of titles is extremely important in portraying how successful and professional film is shown. The use of titles in relation to the is strong. This is why we spent our time in discovering this use of titles. By using 3D camera track, it made it easier to define a use of our idea of titles with this way. The titles in which just pop up on the screen seem to draw the attention away from the film itself. However with the use of these tracking titles, the title itself is embedded into the film. Making it easier to not get distracted yet find out titles about the film. First of all, you have to select the clip you want to be tracked. This clip is what you want the title to be onto. Therefore for our gate handle clip, we chose the section where the gate closes - this being a key shot of the film indicating that Danny hasn't locked the back door. Foreshadowing later on about how the stalker comes round the back door. Once you've selected the clip, you can then right click on the shot in which is still in Premiere Pro, and find the option of 'After Effects Composition". The clip then gets opened up separately in the After Effects Programme ready for you to add the title on.


This effect we used in After Effects provided the clip of the moving handle to be tracked. Once it analysed and tracked the clip, it then gave us points in which follows the handle while its moving. These produced several 100 points, kind of like key frames. Once this was done, we could attach the text written to the points. Once it was attached, we could move it to the correct position shown below. The position of the text was very important in important text into the film. This is because with the right direction and position, it therefore emulates the look of text being embedded in real life. Which is the main idea which we wanted. We made sure the position was the best we could get it, as not all the keyframes worked effectively with the background clip. We tried many times on some shots, however the fact that they were either shaky (meaning we can't use them with warp stabiliser already on them) and they were pull focus shots. This meant that when the tracker was analysing the clip, the focus ruined the key points for the text to be attached onto. This meant then that we couldn't attach the text (title) to the points. Also, if we could do that, the text wouldn't look very professional because the text would be in focus on the clip, whereas the background would be out of focus. Therefore this would look out of place and unprofessional which was against everything we had planned. Moreover, we picked the desired clips which worked the best.

Once we got the right position of the text onto the handle far so it looked as if it was attached to it, we then used colour and font to change the text for the best fit in the film. We searched the internet for the best desired font in which we could use on the clip. We couldn't actually find any text which caught the eye of us, therefore we then looked through the pre-set font options within After Effects itself. Bangla-MN was the font as we feel this had the closest style to our genre, and also was very professional, which made the film more advanced. Choosing colour of the font was easy, as the colour option on After Effects had a colour picker, where you can click on the clip in the section which had your desired colour you wanted, and it then transferred that to your colour picker to then add onto your font. This is shown below where we selected a section of colour to make the font become more blended in to the film. We feel this worked the best and created a professional title.

Once this was completed, because both Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects are connected through Adobe Cloud, it then transferred it to our film automatically and successfully. This created a the clip in Premiere Pro to be red, indicating which clips have been 'effected' on. Which there, is why I chose to use Adobe, because of how it connects together and it transfers effects across the different platforms; ultimately making it so much easier to make a professional short film. This is a much better option than last year, where I chose to use iMovie. Being because it was a safe and simple option, however wasn't the best to create a successful opening trailer for AS; giving me a considerably low grade because of it. Therefore using Premiere Pro gave me the options to expand my capability to produce a successful piece of work for my A2.