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1950s-Era Title Techniques


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Can anyone point me to where I could find info about how they did movie credit sequences in the 1950s? Example frame (from “Monster on the Campus”) attached.

I'm guessing the background is just a painting. I'm specifically curious about how they did the typesetting and then how they photographed the set type over the background painting.

 

credits-example.jpg

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Whenever you're seeing text in a movie of that sort of vintage it'll have existed as a bit of artwork at some point, whether it was signwritten, done with precut lettering, rubdown dry transfer, or whatever else. Then it'll be composited into the background image on an optical printer using any of a few main approaches.

Assuming you drew your text as white lettering on black, you'd shoot it, then print the background image using the negative of the text (thus black where the lettering is) as a matte, leaving black holes where the lettering should be. Then you re-expose the film with a positive print of the text (white where the lettering is) to fill in the lettering. You can offset the two to create shadow effects.

Just double-exposing the white text into the background sort of works, but can look a bit transparent. 

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