Hollywood Film Effects in Your Indie Film: Opening Production Credits

Crafting an effective title sequence for your indie film is one of the most important aspects of film distribution. Consider that the title sequence is what tells the audience how created the film and based on their past work, what the audience can expect from this film they are about to watch. Indie films have the harder effort to make in convincing an audience to watch them, so an effective title sequence allows that gap to be minimized by showing professionalism, clarity, and energy. You want your title sequence to say "Hey, get ready, this is going to be something good".

Before you even get to the title sequence, you have the indie company credits on screen. This does depend on where and how you screen your film. If you are screening your indie film online, then having an over long opening sequence will lower the views of your indie film, as the nature of the Internet audience wants instant gratification. You do have a ten second window to present your indie production company credits, and then the title of your film, but leave all the actor credits at the end of the film. If there are a large number of credits, consider making a web version that only shows the major actors and crew.

Your indie production company credit at the beginning of your indie film should be a bold statement of professionalism. Consider the opening sequence for Lucas Films, the opening of any Paramount film, or the opening for Twentieth Century Fox. Outside of being unique to each company, the other thing they have in common is that they are consistent, they are one of the brands of the company. As such, by branding their films in the same way as their other material, it becomes a language-free symbol that commits to the public memory.

The Indie Filmmaker must consider the same thing and create an effective, catchy, animated logo that is used across all medium, in front of every film and on every cover of every DVD. The thinking is that for the indie filmmaker, to compete against the large studios, you must act like you are equal to the larger studios.

This article will explore one way to make an effective opening sequence for your indie production company logo using Canopus Edius Pro. This technique is not limited to Edius however, as the concept behind it works in any non-linear editor that has at least two video tracks. Several non-linear editors you can use are Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, Avid, Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express. Windows Movie Maker will not be able to do this exercise.

Begin by importing into Edius your source material. You will need two versions of your logo, one plain black and white, the other in color. You will also need to import original music (royalty free, self-created, licensed) into your bin. See Screenshot 001 for how your setup should look.

Once imported, bring down the plain image you have created of your logo to Video Track 1. Use your 3D picture in picture tool to adjust the size and rotation of the image. What you want is the image to start out askew, then center, hold, and then rotate out. Open the track to reveal the opacity adjustment tool and create key frames. What you are looking for is the image to fade in, hold for a few seconds and fade out. This should coincide with the rotation so that the fade in is a second ahead of the centering, and the fade out is a second after the end rotation. Please see Image 002 for details

Now, add your music to the Audio timeline (see image 003). Adjust your music so that the crash of sound, the largest part of the sound, occurs in the middle of the centering of the original layer.

Now add your colour image to Video Track 2. Adjust the opacity layers of Video Track to so that the image fades in quickly (as in with less than a frame length) over the original image during the centering of the rotation. Then, let the image fade out a second before the end of the clip. See Image 004 for details.

Adjust your music so that it fades out as well from 100% to 0% when the opacity of Video Track 2 is at 0%.

Finally, adjust your "Out Marker" so that the video ends one second after the music ends on the timeline, when the volume is at 0%

Export your indie film title as an AVI and you are ready to import it into any indie film you make knowing you are taking advantage of branding to increase audience awareness of your film.