"Star Wars" Text Scroll Effect - Another Way

JK wrote a good blog on creating this effect. I figured out a slightly simpler way to achieve the same thing, so thought I’d post it here if anyone’s interested. There may be better ways to do this.

Anyway, here goes:

Position four or five rectangular slats one on top of each other, covering the top half of the screen. Colour each slat the same as your sky background, but with a gradually increasing translucency (alpha value) from completely opaque (for the slat at the top of the screen) to about 10% (for the bottom slat at mid screen). If all of these are positioned .01 ahead of your text in z-space, the text will appear to gradually fade and disappear as it moves up because it will be underneath the gradually darkening slats. The slats themselves will be invisible agains the same-coloured background (especially if it’s black). Any stars can then be placed on top of everything after.

As far as the text is concerned, just type out your text and center it, then break text apart twice and group it all. Then use the perspective tool on the grouped text to create your trapezoid shape, making the text appear to slant away into the distance.

Using the transform tool to keyframe, your first keyframe would be with only the top line of text showing at the bottom of the camera view window, covering the entire width of the screen. Your next keyframe would be with the entire box of text shrunk to maybe one or two inches wide and the whole thing moved to the very top center of the camera view window. Simply extend the second keyframe in the timeline window to adjust timing of the scroll.

Here’s a very brief sample. If you spend more time and make adjustments, you can make it look even better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np44t_GQDUw

Cheers.

DanB.

Interesting. It seems that the scroll sort of speeds up at the end. Is that something that could be controlled with the timing within TBS?

Mike

Yes, I put it together very quickly just to see if the idea worked, and I noticed it sped up at the end too. But you’d just have to add an extra keyframe and extend the last one out a bit to adjust that. Or you could probably fix it with the function editor.

DanB.

The reason it appears to speed up I guess, is that the text at the top is much bigger than the text at the bottom. Moving at the same rate, the smaller text would appear then to move quicker. A gradual decrease in speed with the function editor to match the gradual decrease in size of the text would solve the problem (in theory).

Cheers,

DanB.