While I Finish Finals — Credits!

So my last Final is on the 19th, which is only 3 days from now, but still — this is a perfect excuse for me to not work on my Thesis for a couple days and to take a goddamned break for once!

However, fun-fact: It’s impossible for me to not think about my film whenever I have free time. And lately I’ve been thinking about one aspect of my film that is ultimately the least important, but it can also make the film a whole lot better:

CREDITS!!

And I know that it makes me a totally typical film student, but I absolutely adore the opening titles for the film “Enter The Void” because I find them to be super inspirational.

These credits are amazing in so many ways. Artistically, they are an impressive feat of editing and graphic design skill. But in relation to Enter The Void as a movie, they do a perfect job of preparing the viewer for a film that no one can ever really be prepared for.

Now, I don’t want to copy Enter The Void’s credits, because other people have done that and it’s not cute.

(Except I love the lyric video for Die Young, so– haha oops whatever)

And besides, having incomprehensible flashing colors and lights for my film wouldn’t really fit with — actually wait no, come to think of it, it kind of would fit (thematically speaking) with Phantoms In The Dark! I mean, Phantoms is a film that deals with topics such as partying and fear and supernatural beings. Scary flashing changing fonts and colors isn’t too far off from that!

But still, I don’t want to copy. However, I am taking inspiration. And I figure a good way of starting with the creative process for this would be to get some cool strong fonts for the title of the film. So I went through all the fonts I have on my computer, and I ended up selecting a mere 45 that had some semblance of something good to them… and then I slowly rounded them down to 12 that all worked pretty well:

My main thought process in rounding down fonts was choosing a look that is, Fun, Scary, and/or  Victorian-Era Vintage, since those are the elements that my film mixes.

And in case you’re curious, here are the names of those fonts:

But wait! The fun hasn’t stopped yet. Because by some random twist of fate, I just learned TODAY that apparently Maya can very easily generate 3D text in whatever font and style you want!!! And it can generate it in multiple ways! Behold:

(These are just the voice actors obviously. Also I chose fonts that fit the personality types of the characters that each voice actor plays. Hence why mine is all weird-y and ghosty, haha) (Also I’m a weird person to begin with so hey it fits)

As you can see, Maya does a pretty decent job! And yet it also fucks up at a few places too (Notice the missing R in “Dark,” the painful irregularity in Michael Malconian’s credit (then again I knew that font would cause difficulty), and the filled-in holes in the S’s in Jesse Pilchen’s name)

So yea! This is clearly just the beginning. And while I don’t know how the closing titles of my film will eventually turn out, I do know one thing — they’re gonna be awesome. AND I have lots of truly amazing fonts to play around with! When I finish studying for my Lighting and Rendering final today, I may just play around in photoshop making concept-art for the credits, haha!

That’s all for now, though. More to come!