Silent Movie Title Cards

[Jerzy Drozda jr]

what are you looking for exactly with those cards, because no one is going to tell you how do design one for sure. it depends on you.

after you design a card in photoshop or even in AE (with solids, masks, strokes and text) you may want to create this old movie effect. there are many plugins that do that. some a free, some not. and I bet this topic was discussed on this forum several times.

there are many tutorials out there how to do that. in fact,
i think that Andrew has a tutorial on that also.

check out his website: https://videocopilot.net/

good luck

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maltaannon.com – Free After Effects Video Tutorials and more

[Elixir19]

I guess I’m looking for font ideas and how to do those fancy borders. Once I have that core look, i can do the old-film look myself.
Thank you!

[Steve Roberts]

For the fancy borders, you should be able to find stock books and discs in the art section of a well-stocked bookstore, or online … Googling “stock” and “borders”?

But you need to view those old movies to get examples into your head, then go through your fonts to see what looks similar.

[Rob Webster]

You’ve gotten some good advice. I did a video series a few years back with such cards (see an example here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uF_M5ty4auA ) and got the look by renting some old Chaplin movies and some other historic footage. The Perlanger Archives online have tons of old movies, too. (https://www.archive.org/details/prelinger)Getting the right font is key. Go to http://www.dafont.com, look under “fancy”, then “retro” and you’ll find some good options. In my video, the opening title card had a border; the other cards did not. I can’t remember where I found the border, though.

I’d recommend using a combination of filters and effects. A number of plugin collections come with “bad film” effects. Even the free Windows Movie Maker program has a way to do it. But I found that tweaking my own tinting and vignetting gave me more control and a more authentic look.

One other note, related not so much to the title cards as to the rest of your film, is to study the old ones and think about how the camera is placed. I violated this in my own, and wish I hadn’t, but in those days, 2 things were true: Cameras were bulky and hard to move, so don’t use hand-held shots, and also, many early film makers were two-dimensional in their thinking. In other words, they were thinking about actors on a stage facing an audience. Lots of old Three Stooges scenes have the Stooges all in a row, facing out towards an “audience”, the camera. “Citizen Kane” re-thought what cinema could be, but not everyone immediately caught on. If you really want to capture the look of early film making, go beyond just making the film look old. Think about shot composition and the limitations, both physical and creative, that those early film makers were working with.

-Rob