The opening crawl for Star Wars is one of the most distinctive effects and also one of the easiest to create with a good understanding of what After Effects is doing.

The text:
The first thing that needs to be done is to create the text to scroll up the screen. This is best done with Photoshop so that you can have the background be see through. However, it can still be done with other programs.

Assuming you have Photoshop, open that and create a new picture with the width twice what you want the width of your video to be. For example, if you want the width of your final video to be 320 pixels, select 640. For height, choose something very tall (It’s hard to judge how much text you’ll have but since anything extra is invisible, it won’t really matter). Make sure the “Contents” is set to “Transparent”. Hit “OK”. Now you’ll see a new window you’ll be creating your scrolling text in. It will be filled with a grey and white checkered pattern. This just means that there’s nothing there.

Select the text tool. Click and drag to create a text box over the entire composition.

Along the top of the screen you’ll see a series of controls for your font. Select the font you want to use (Arial is good enough for me). Also, you’ll probably want to select Bold. Make sure the text is set to be left justified. Also, select a very large font. Probably around 36. Remember this text is going to be passing very close to a virtual camera so a large font will prevent the letters from looking pixelated.

Now that you’ve got your font all set up, start typing your text. You’ll notice that your text is black. That’s fine for now. If you changed it to yellow, you’d be straining your eyes to see it so we’ll change it in the last step. Also remember that if you’re having trouble seeing what you’re typing, increase the zoom on the control bar.

With Photoshop, there’s not a justify setting for your text, so you’ll have to manually space all your words so they take up the full line. Do this by inserting extra spaces between the words.

Once your text is lined up nicely, highlight all of it by clicking and dragging your mouse over it.

Then change the color to yellow.

This color setting may be to bright for some and isn’t entirely correct, so feel free to find a yellow that you like better if you’re picky.

Making the text scroll:
Now it’s time to make that text scroll. Open up After Effects now. Go to Composition > New > Composition. Set your heighth to whatever you want (360 x 240 is a standard size). And your Duration to however long you want your video to be.

Now you’ll see a screen like this:

The window labeled “Untitled Project.aep” shows what files you’ve imported and all your compositions. The window that says “Comp 1” Shows your video as it stands now. The one that says “Comp 1 – Timeline” allows you to arrange your files.

Now you need to get the text you created. Go to File > Import > File and find the text you created. Import that (if something pops up, select “Merged Layers”). You’ll now see it in the window labelled “Untitled Project.aep” (When you save the project it will replace “Untitled Project with your filename”). Drag that into the Timeline window. You’ll notice it pops up in the “Comp 1” window (if you can’t see any of the text, you’ll see an x in a circle). However, depending on how much text you had, you may not be able to see it. Click on the “Comp 1” window and then go to View > Zoom Out. The window will shrink to show your video at 50% size. You’ll have to expand the window to be able to see all of the text box you just imported. Expand the window until you can see the white line.

That white line represents the borders of the text layer. Click and drag that down until you can see your text. You’ll also notice that the text is huge! Don’t worry about that. Just click and drag those boxes in the corners until it’s the right size.

Now you’ll notice that the text looks a little pixelated. Go ahead and hit zoom in again under the View menu. To get rid of the pixelation, go to Layer > Quality > Best. Now the text will have nice fuzzy edges.

The next thing to do is make the text scroll. In the Timeline window click on the little arrow pointing right and you’ll get a drop down menu that says “Transform”. Hit the arrow next to that and you’ll get a whole list of options. The one you’re looking for is the one that says “Position”. Click the little stopwatch next to “Position”. This will enable keyframes.

A quick little explanation of keyframes: Keyframes allow you to animate things with ease. By setting a keyframe at one frame, you can tell the computer where you want the item to be (in this case your text). Then you move to a later frame and move the item and the computer will animate the item between those two.

So what you’re going to do is tell the computer to animate the text to move up. By hitting that stopwatch you just set your first keyframe, illustrated by that diamond off to the right. Now we’ll need the text to start off screen. So in the “Comp 1” window, drag your text down until it’s just off the bottom of the viewable area. Still in the Timeline window, move the time marker (that little blue arrow) to around 2 minutes into the window.

Go back to the “Comp 1” window. Now drag your text up until the last line just goes off the top of the screen. Now if you drag the time marker around in the Timeline, you’ll notice the text goes up. However, it’s still not going off into the distance.

Making the tilt:
To create the tilt, we’ll need a 3-D perspective. So we’ll add a 3D camera. Select your text in the Timeline window. Go to Layer > New > Camera. Now you’ll see a “Camera 1” in the Timeline window.

Now things start getting into 3 dimensions and a bit harder to follow. If you have AE 5.5, click on your “Comp 1” window and hit “View > New View”. You should see another window exactly the same as your Comp 1 window. If you don’t have AE 5.5, you’ll have to skip this.

In the original Star Wars movies, the opening scroll was created by having the yellow letters on a long blue screen and passing the camera down it. The blue was removed and the letters placed over a starfield. In our version, we’re doing something similar except that we’ll be moving the text instead of the camera and we don’t need bluescreen since Photoshop makes the background clear already.

The reason for wanting that second window that 5.5 allows is that in one, we’ll have one set to a view to get the camera set up, and another set to what the camera’s seeing. If you can’t do this because you have 5.0, you’ll have to switch views a lot to get it right.

If you have two “Comp 1” windows, click on one. This will be the one we move the camera around in. Go to View > Zoom Out. Hit that twice and that window will get very small. We’ll need to to be small. Now go to View > Switch 3D View > Left. Your view in that will change. However, since you don’t have much in there, you might not be able to tell. In the Timeline window, click on “Camera 1”. If you didn’t have it before, you should see an X in a circle and a vertical line. You’ll also see some diagonal lines.

Make that window bigger until you can see everything. What you’ll see, is that vertical line with the X in a circle. Those diagonal lines you now see are making a triangle. At the right side, there’s a box.

Now to explain what all of that is. The vertical line is your text. If you go back to the timeline and move the time indicator around, you’ll see that the line goes up and down. This is the text scrolling.

The box off to the right is your “Camera”. The triangle is its field of view. The X in the circle is what it’s pointed at. If you move the camera, it will stay pointed on that point. Which is a good thing!

Now we have to move the camera into a position so it will make the text look like it’s going off towards infinity. Click and drag your camera until it is in this position:

Now go back to your timeline and drag the time marker (that little blue triangle) until it’s at the first frame (all the way to the left).

Things to notice: The field of view of the camera is seeing a little of your text even though it’s off the black box that represents your field of view; Your center of focus (the X in the circle) is where that vertical line will cross. These things are important now.

If you’re on 5.5, look at your other Comp 1 window which was showing what the camera was. You should see this:

This is the first frame and the text is already on screen! We’ll have to get it back out of the shot. Now you’ll be changing your center of focus for your camera. So go back to the left view by clicking on your Comp 1 window and hitting View > Switch 3D View > Left on 5.0 if you need to change that window back. If you’re on 5.5 and have the 2 windows open, you don’t need to do this.

Now you should see why it was important that the field of view of the camera (that triangle) caught some of the text below the box. So we’ll have to fix that by changing where the camera is looking. Click and drag the x in the circle until the bottom line of that triangle meets the text line at the edge of that window. Now if you switch back to the Active Camera View (View > Switch 3D View > Active Camera) you shouldn’t see anything. Which is because the text hasn’t scrolled up yet.

Now switch back to your Timeline window and move the time marker up a bit. You should see the text scrolling off into infinity now.

Now is a good time to stop and do some:

Troubleshooting:
By now there’s a whole number of things you could have done wrong. Here’s a few of the ones I’ve made repetedly:

Problem: I’ve finished doing everything but when I look at the final thing the text is HUGE and goes WAY past the right and left edges once I’m looking at the active camera!

Solution #1: This is because you’ve placed the camera too close to the text. Imagine taking a sheet of paper and putting your nose on it and looking down it. This is about what your effect is like. Now imagine you could get your eye even closer to the paper. Those words on the left and right will go out of your field of view. This is essentially your problem. To fix it, go back to the Left View and move the camera a bit to the right.

Solution #2: Another solution is to simply shrink your text down. Find the boxes that control the corners of the text box and pull them in and down until they look right. However, this might make your text not scroll up when you want it to since it’s furhter down and those keyframes you set a loooong time ago set themselves for the center of the layer. So you’ll need to redo those. Move to the first frame in the Timeline window. Make your View set to left again. If your text isn’t coming up at the right time you’ll notice the white line is way below the box. You could try to move it up with the mouse. However, there’s a good chance you’ll move it in the Z direction too and it will be off then. Instead, go to the timeline window. Make sure that triangle is hit so you get the drop down window. Under Transform find Position. To the right of it will be three numbers. Those are the x, y, and z coordinates respectively for the current frame. Change the second one (the y) until that white line is just off the screen again.

Problem: My text scrolls and is tilted, but it goes off the screen at the top when I’m viewing the active camera.

Solution: Going back to that paper reference, your problem is that you’re head (the camera) is looking at it to much face on still. Move it down closer to the paper. This is the same thing you need to do with your camera. To get a good feel for where the text will be ending, move the time marker to around the 2 minute mark. Switch to the Left View again. You’ll see where the white line (your text) intersects the line across from the camera. You should have it set up so that it crosses with roughly ¾ of the line across from the camera on the left, and ¼ on the right. Like this

Problem: My scroll is going to fast or to slow!

Solution: Obviously you know how to use this program and were able to preview it already. Good for you, but we’ll fix that later.

Problem: Those were all the problems that I can think of off the top of my head. But I’m sure you’ll have more!

Solution: Email me!

Now that you’ve got your text scrolling off towards infinity, there’s a few more things you’re going to need to do. First of all, you’ll notice I told you to set that second keyframe at the 2 minute point. That means that after 2 minutes, that text is going to stop scrolling. However, by that time you won’t need your text anymore. If you’re going by the main theme, the text will all be gone after 1:32.

Another thing to notice is that your text is probably scrawling very slow. Well, maybe you haven’t noticed, but you should. So I’ll explain how to do a quick preview. In AE, there’s an option called a “RAM Preview”. Basically it exports the video to your computer’s RAM and plays it back. However, it can usually only do around 15 seconds. But that should be all you need to get a feel for speed. To do the RAM preview check out the Time controls window. It’s a window that looks like this:

If you don’t have this little window hit Ctrl + 3 and you should get it. This is an extremely useful little device. Let’s explore it a bit more before we go any further. The first button (the arrow pointing left at the line) moves you back to the first frame of the composition. The next one (the left pointing arrow with the line after it) moves you one frame backwards. The triangle pointing right starts playing the video as fast as it can process each frame. This will not be at full speed since it will have to render each frame and there will be no sound. The next button moves one frame forward. The arrow pointing right to the line moves to the last frame. The button all the way to the right (the three lines with the right pointing arrow) is the RAM Preview button. If you hit that, it will start previewing your movie. It may take a bit to load but then it will play back at full speed. As I mentioned before, it will only be around 15 seconds that it can preview at one time.

So now that you’ve previewed your clip, you should see just how slow it really is moving. Plodding along isn’t it? Fortunately, it’s quite easy to fix! Look down in the Timeline window again. You should still see those two diamonds that represent those keyframes. Click and drag on the one to the right. Move it left. Now the scroll has to move the same distance, but has less time to do it. Thus it will go faster.

Like I mentioned before, the Star Wars theme always has the scroll disappearing at around 1:32. So you can pull that second diamond all the way to that point without worrying about it.

But perhaps it’s still going to slow. If it is, set your time marker to whichever frame your last keyframe is on. And make sure you get it exactly on that frame. Use the next frame and previous frame on the Time Control window to help. Once you have it on that frame, adjust that y coordinate in the Position drop down to a lower value (while it seems counter intuitive it works. Don’t believe me? Try it.). This will make it have to travel further in the same amount of time. Thus, going even faster. Now try another RAM Preview and see if it’s at a speed you like yet.

Once you have gotten a speed you like you can move on to the final step. If you notice, as far off as you can get the scroll to infinity, it will still never disappear. Thus, we’re going to have to help it out a bit. Go to the same frame you have that second position keyframe. Now we’re going to set up some opacity keyframes. Once you’re at that frame. Back up about 15-20 frames using the Time Controls window. Now look down in the Timeline window again. Underneath your Transform menu, you’ll see an option called Opacity. Hit the stopwatch to the left of it. This will enable the keyframes for opacity. Right now your opacity at 100%. Move back to that last keyframe for the position which is where the scroll would stop moving. Now change the Opacity to 0%. Now between those two keyframes it will fade out. Should look pretty good now.

That’s the end of creating the scroll. However, to really finish off the full Star Wars opening, there’s a few more things that need to be done:
Creating the Star Wars Logo
Adding the Star Field
Panning down to a Planet
Adding and Synching With Music
(Further tutorials on the above are forthcoming.)

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for improvement, please Email Me!