Remembering Optical Titles
Added 2025-01-14 13:34:36 +0000 UTCThey were done by hand and by machine, but optical title work was the mainstay of films for many decades in the 20th Century. Some questions were asked in my weekly livestream so I went down memory lane... Enjoy!
Comments
Back in the 70s I worked as Video Engineer at the BBC in West London. We used a roller system for end credits which used matt black paper rolls the same width as A4 (210mm or 8.25"). They were made using a special typewriter that printed in white using a large font. There were occasions when the roller was not properly set up and was not vertical. Mostly this was caught during rehearsal, but occasionally it would happen on a live show and nothing could be done. The same typewriter could also type in black on yellow paper to make rolls for a teleprompter.
Sadiq Mohamed
2025-01-16 01:01:51 +0000 UTCAbout 20 years ago I was working as a freelance Video Editor and was regularly employed by the manufacturer of Lightworks. This was a very good digital system used mainly by film editors as it had a GUI which mimicked a Steinbeck film editing table. In this instance I was employed to help out on a low budget movie called "Seaview Knights". I had taught the film editor how to use the system and found him a good assistant who had Lightworks experience. The movie had been shot on 35mm and was going to be shown theatrically on film. At the end of the editing I got to supervise the titles and credits. The distributor had a set of rules for the size and duration of each of the front titles, and a list of end credits had been produced. I timed the titles by using the Lightworks subtitling feature to make a demo. I then took everything with text files on floppy to the animation house that would be making the film version. They used a computer captioning system to make the final versions and had a special printer that printed onto high contrast reversal 35mm film using lasers. That went to the film lab who produced a composite print of the front tiles so we could project it. It was a fascinating job. I had a lot of experience with film by that time though this was my first cinema job.
Sadiq Mohamed
2025-01-16 00:44:28 +0000 UTCI used microfiche a lot at work in the 80s/90s. We had complete operating system listings on fiche and I had a set at home too for reference when we had system crashes.
Bob Pockney
2025-01-14 18:10:47 +0000 UTCPolaroid 35mm Polachrome Instant Color Slide Film Cs-135-12 Iso 40/17
Jim Grover
2025-01-14 15:17:54 +0000 UTC
