Making a Halloween opening title

This tutorial demonstrates how to make a nice scary opening title for your Halloween home movie

The opening title

The trailer is a short clip with the sound of thunder, a lightning effect and a scary pictures that illuminates when the lightning appears. You can watch it by clicking on the image on the right. It was created using Adobe Premiere Pro, but I think that the same effect can also be achieved with Adobe Premiere Elements. In order to create the round picture of the skeleton I used Adobe Photoshop.

Step 1: Getting your material

Great thing of the Internet is that you can find all kinds of free stuff that you can use in your projects. Just make sure that you only use material that is free from copyright. The items that are used in this tutorial are:

• A picture of a skeleton found at
  http://www.home2garden.org/halloween-background.html
• The sound of thunder found at
  http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/soundfx/Weather.shtml
• An appropriate font called Halloween found at
  http://www.halloweenfonts.com/

Step 2: Creating the round picture

In order to create a realistic illumination of the picture, the best is to use a picture with a soft border. I have chosen to make a round picture, using Adobe Photoshop. Start Photoshop en open the picture in it. Select the Elliptical Marquee Tool, set Feather to a value of for example 40px and draw a circle around the area that you want to grab.

From the main menu select Edit->Copy. Create a new Photoshop document using File->New.

The nice thing is that Photoshop automatically sets the size for the new document to the size of the picture on the clipboard. Make sure to make the background of the new document transparant. With the new document open select Edit->Paste and the circular image with the soft edge will appear in the new document. Save the new picture as a Photoshop document.

Step 3: Setting up the project

First start up Premiere and create a new project with yor preferred settings. Import the Photoshop file that was created in Step 1 and the sound files that you want to use. Because the duration of the thunder sounds are fixed, best is to first place the sounds on an audio track on the timeline and build the project to match to the sounds. I placed two thunder sound clips on audio track 4.

Step 4: Creating the lightning

The lightning is behind the title so the easiest way to achieve this is to create a seperate Black Video (New->Black Video) and place it on video track 1. Now, add a lightning effect from the Effects tab, Video Effects, Render. You can tweak the lightning by going to the Effect Controls tab. There are many parameters that you can tweak. Most of them are self explanatory, but best is to play around a bit with them and play the effect to see what is happening.

Step 5: Create the flashing image

After import, place it on the timeline on track 2. From the Effect Controls tab use Postion and Scale to place it on the desired position and in the desired size on the screen.

There are several options to make the image flash. One is to use Opacity keyframes, but the disadvantage is that you need to create a lot of them and manipulate each of them individually. Easier is to use the Strobe Light effect. This effect can be found under Video Effects, Stylize. This effect also has a number of parameters. Because we want to use the stroboscope effect to let the image appear and dissappear again, the following two paramters must be set as follows:

• Blend with Orginal: 0%
• Strobe: Makes Layer Transparant

In order to create the right flashing, play around a bit with some of the other parameters, but I have found that the following combination gives a nice effect:

• Strobe Duration: 0.10
• Strobe Period: 0.17
• Random Strobe Probability: 30%

By the way: the strobe can also be used in life footag to create flashes of lightning. In this case use Strobe: Operates On Color Only and Strobe Operator: Add. Using white as the strobe color this will create nice "overexposure" effects which you can see if you film during lightning.

Step 6: Create the title

Simply create a new title, type in the text using the desired font. White was choosen as the basic color for the text. The bottom half of the letters where made red by using a red Sheen (under Fill). with the parameters parameters Size and Offset tweaked in such a way that the right effect is achieved..

That's it. Use the clip as a starting title for your Halloween movie and you already have the attention of your audience.