How to Make Star Wars Opening Crawl in HitFilm Express!

hitfilm sensei here today in this video we are going to tackle one of the most requested tutorials I have and that is how to do the Star Wars opening crawl in hitfilm express now I'm delighted to say that I am working in hitfilm express version 5 but I can tell you that this will work in any version of hitfilm so whenever you are watching this video you should be able to get this to work so we're gonna start by creating a new composite shot and it will be whatever length it needs to be I'm gonna make it a minute 30 and click OK but depending on your music and how big your crawl is and what you're doing you all of that stuff will end up changing so these are sort of the basics that you will do to get your crawl going okay the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to create a new text layer and I want it to be 1320 by 400 on a 1080p scaled video and I am going to just type in a long time ago in a galaxy far comma far away dot dot and after highlighting that I'm gonna go and find a font that works now if you have some Star Wars fonts on your computer that's great okay but if you don't then what I have found is Franklin Franklin Gothic works pretty well okay and you'll change the color to some sort of a light blue alright and then you'll just want to increase it until the second far comes down to the second line there okay you might want to Center it so that it looks pretty good now this usually goes and I'm gonna just rename this a long time and this usually goes about five or six seconds okay so if I go ahead and start by keyframing the opacity and dropping that down to zero if I then go to say one second and I go up to 100% I then say go to five seconds or now let's go to four seconds four seconds and I hit this button to make another keyframe and then I go to five seconds and I keyframe it down to zero then I'll have it what I want to do is grab all of those keyframes and click this little guy right here to make it smooth okay so now it will look like this comes up and then goes away just like that okay and at five seconds it is gone so I'm just going to go ahead and trim it to that point okay now before I go any further I probably will want to add a new grade layer and on that grade layer I'm going to add an effect and that effect will be the letterbox effects so that way I know exactly where my letterbox is okay now if you have a Star Wars logo that's a PNG and just transparent or whatever and you want to use that feel free okay and I have one too but I'm gonna go ahead and do this a little bit differently I'm gonna create a new text layer and I'm going to make it the size of my composite shot or or my screen which is 1920 by 1080 click OK and then I am going to actually type in in all capital letters star and Wars just like that okay and I'm going to highlight that I'm going to Center it and I'm going to make it really big and I am going to change the color to yellow now the problem is is that normally this is sort of a different looking letter so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna find one that I like and I'm gonna actually use a Star Wars Star Jedi font but it's filled in so what I want to do is I actually want to go ahead and make it transparent and instead make this part this outside edging yellow and then just increase that okay now it's a little bit bunched up here so I think I will spread them out a little bit to taste here maybe about that far okay that looks okay I think we'll go with that okay and there's my logo all right so now what is going to happen and this actually I'm gonna I'm gonna actually call this title and that may be a different title whoops I have it all in capital letters let's try that again title this may be a different title for yours okay so it will come down here next and it will appear right here and this is where the music starts Bom right what I want to do is I want to add a new camera layer and then I can make the title itself three-dimensional if I change to a second view and make the second view a left-handed view then I can sort of see where my title is okay and if I were to grab that and slide it forward until it is just getting ready to appear on the screen maybe right there okay and then I keyframe the position of it and then I go forward you know usually that lasts about six or seven seconds go six seconds okay because it's let's make it a quick and then it goes way out like that okay at this point of course I would want it to have faded out so I'm gonna go ahead and keep fraying the opacity here and make it zero if I back up and to there then it's a hundred percent now actually what I really want to do is I want to move these out so I'm just going to grab them and I'm gonna slide them out as far whoops I'm gonna slide them out as far as I want them to be okay maybe about like that long so now what we have until this point is this so we're gonna get rid of the grid it comes on it says a long time ago blah blah blah fades out and then bang and here comes the Star Wars etc and so on now if you want that perhaps to wait a minute or two or a second I mean maybe I'll back that up so that it doesn't you know it fades out there and then boom it starts okay at the same time that that starts though we have a a bunch of stars appear okay so I'm gonna create a new plane layer and I'm gonna call it stars make sure it's black click okay I'm gonna bring it down underneath everything and it will appear when the title text appears and I'm going to add two effects so that one will be the fractal noise effect and I am going to make it a store field okay and I can just leave that if I wasn't planning on painting my camera at all after this but usually people pan the camera somewhere so the second one I'm gonna add will be the 360 video viewer effect and I will go ahead and change the scale of that to about 20% so they look kind of very nice like stores okay so now this there are no start buying and then now there are stars okay alright about you know right here or so is where my texts are going to begin somewhere in this neighborhood okay where they gonna start the crawls gonna start from here okay so here's how this is going to work basically I am going to create a crawl that's going to three-dimensionally slide on back okay so I'm gonna start by making a title I'm just gonna go ahead and let's make it about that big now my problem is that this is way too big and all that kind of stuff so I'm just gonna type a letter in my title okay and then I'm gonna say ctrl a and then I'm gonna rescale that until I can actually see it okay I'm gonna make this back to zero I'm gonna go ahead and refill this and make that zero and I'm gonna change the font back to my franklin gothic okay which is which is gonna work pretty well for the other thing as well okay alright from here I can now go ahead and just sort of change it to the size that I want the title to be so let's say I want it to be about that big and I wanted to say in all capital letters the Phantom sensei and I do want it to be all on one line of course there we go and I do want it to be centered so what I'm going to do is this will be the title again right this is sort of maybe it title like this okay and I want this title to appear more back here and again just like I did before I want to go ahead and sort of Center this okay and I want it to be mostly centered within itself here so you know about their center of the screen sort of a thing okay so yeah that looks pretty good now I want it to be a little taller so I'm gonna go and break the scale and make it about 200% tall on the y-axis and there's my phantom sensei title okay I'm gonna push that back and now I'm gonna start working on and and by the way if I needed an episode number I would make an episode number just like that okay now I'm gonna start working on my actual crawl itself so I'm just going to draw myself a fairly large box and I'm gonna actually type in the crawl itself so now that I've typed in that crawl what's going to happen is is I need to sort of make it you know block justification all right I'm gonna go ahead and make it just a little bit smaller across the board about eighty maybe and also the original title can be removed now that it's gone right so I'm just gonna slice that and get rid of it yeah so when it's gone it's gone okay all right so now what's going to happen is this I need to actually justify it okay block justify so it has a center justification as a left justification as a right justification but it hitfilm does not have a center justification and that's sort of a pain so what we're gonna do is is we are going to just create our own okay I'm gonna left justify it and then I'm just going to start pushing like this okay and maybe I'll add a space here and then bang see how that one shifted over a little bit when that happens I'm gonna delete that shift and use a carriage return instead okay now this one doesn't need anything because it's already shifted so I'm just going to delete that one and bring it on over now we got quite a big space here so I'm gonna add a couple of spaces there add a couple of spaces there add a couple of spaces there maybe a couple of there maybe a couple more whoops wrong sign how about a couple right here a couple right there maybe there and when that actually happens then I can backspace and enter okay all right now I'm gonna do the same thing here and until I get to a point where I'm feeling like um there we go okay and okay and I might do that for all of these until I am done so now that I've done all of those I'm just going to sort of maneuver it into position and I'll bring the other one in here too and so now basically this is going to be my crawl this is how it looks alright so what I want to do is is I want to make both of these into three dimensional planes and then I'm going to add a new point layer and that point is also going to be a three dimensional plane and I am going to us a line or parent those two to that three dimensional plane now our point now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to my left handed and under the three dimensional point I am just going to rotate the x axis rotation until I like it okay some people I I think around 75 is a good number okay some people like to go as low as 60 I think that's too low some people like to go as high as 80 I think that's a little high 70 or 75 maybe 72 something like that he's pretty good I'm gonna go 75 okay and then you could just grab the green arrow and just slide it okay so I'm gonna back this up until just when it's supposed to be starting onto the screen like there and I am going to keyframe the position then I'm gonna go out until the point where I think I want it to fade out and I'm just gonna drag it on out there okay and that will depend on your music and everything else okay but then at that point your title and your text will your crawl and your title will the opacity will sort of fade out over about a second so I'm just gonna create a couple of keyframes and have it go from zero or from 100 to zero and I'll just copy those and I will do the same thing right there so that just sort of fades out okay at that point then your camera may pan right and other things will happen but basically that is the general gist of how you would create a opening Star Wars crawl in hitfilm now if you don't like this is too wide or something like that you can always narrow it change it you can change the scale of it you could change the font size and then rework it you know however you want but basically that's the idea in a nutshell make sure you get it right the way it looks for your film and then go for it if you have any questions leave them in the comments below otherwise thanks for watching if you would like to keep up with the latest tutorial videos from hitfilm sensei consider liking the hit film sensei Facebook page following the hit film sensei Twitter feed and subscribing to the hit film since 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Channel: Film Sensei

Views: 17,232

Keywords: Star Wars, opening crawl, crawl, HitFilm Express, star wars opening crawl, hitfilm star wars crawl, hitfilm star wars, title crawl, star wars fan film crawl, opening crawl hitfilm, hitfilm title crawl, opening crawl in hitfilm, star wars opening crawl in hitfilm, star wars in hitfilm, fan film opening crawl, fan film opening crawl star wars, star wars fan film

Id: GnahN4x_D0w

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2017