Customer Reviews

Title Design Essentials for Film and Video

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Experienced video editors and amateurs alike will find this handbook essential to any film project, with its narrow focus on how to create professional titles for projects and an approach that moves beyond genre or software. From avoiding the common pitfalls of confusing titles to understanding size, color, placement and more, these tips paired with a DVD of Quick Time movies offers essential keys to production which are the foundation works of a good design. Any film library or practicing film and video pro or neo-pro needs this.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

This is a great book. Other reviewers say that it is too simple and I agree....it is simple which is why it is so good. Most books on titles and graphics use examples that are so advanced that they would only be used once in awhile if at all...mainly for commercials. This book shows the basics of title creation that is used all the time.
If you want to dive into After Effects this is not the book for you. If you want to create the type of titles used in about 95% of all productions this is the book for you.

Title Design Essentials for Film and Video
written by Mary Plummer

This book comes in a handy compact size and is aimed at beginners. This isn't a book meant to teach motion graphic-related programs. Readers will instead learn the basic design principles involved with the creation process. Terminology is well-covered, as are various techniques and specific working scenarios.

There are a lot of tips along the way, set apart in either blue boxes or text. Before a major concept is presented, there's always a checklist present in order to get the reader thinking ahead of time, a big plus.

Chapter 6 is the culmination of the previous five. It allows readers to complete four basic projects to get started. The chapter goes further to show several background examples to readers, however with no practical application of the processes being discussed. Would have been nice to be able to see actual examples of titles described in each example.

It would have also been useful to include a chapter on the book covering the various motion graphics software packages available, as well as a trial copy of each on the DVD included with the book. Perhaps this can be addressed in a future edition.

Titles and lower thirds are a crucial part of any video project. Making text that's both readable and pleasing to look at is enough a challenge on top of making it all work for various video backgrounds and screen sizes. Though limited to pure beginner material, Title Design Essentials for Film and Video gives a solid method for creating quality screen text.

The examples are very simple, yet completely thorough. If you're not sure about glows, drop shadows and the like, you have literally every basic option demonstrated for you.

The author based her work from an Apple perspective, using Final Cut, LiveType, etc..., but the technical aspects are left pretty vague, since you should be able to do these things on almost any program.

What really makes this book worthwhile are the more practical examples at the end, which help create a solid workflow to build graphics on; a workflow that aims for readability as well as a visually pleasing composition.

The appendix also has some handy tables for the keycodes for commonly used symbols like © and (tm).

Title Design Essentials for Film and Video is definitely geared toward the absolute beginner, but considering how many poorly designed and hard to read title there are out there, there are plenty who could learn from it. It might only be worth buying used, but it's a nice book to have handy.

Warning! This book is for absolute beginners only!!! You will get bored after 2 minutes reading if you have more than one year of experience in the field of graphic or title design. The book is more a tutorial for the most basic, random title designs, than a book that helps you to understand the genre of title designs.