Star Wars intro generator
A blank line starts a new paragraph. The films run to about 80 words.
The three parts of the opening
| The blue line | 0 to 6 seconds | Fades in on black, holds for about four seconds and fades out. Blue, left-aligned, two lines. |
| The logo | 7 to 15 seconds | Appears at full width as an outline with nothing inside, then shrinks toward the centre of a star field until it's gone. |
| The crawl | From 12.5 seconds | Episode number, a title in capitals, then justified paragraphs in yellow, tilted away and fading out before they reach the vanishing point. |
Times are at film pace. The speed buttons run the same sequence 1.5 or 2 times faster, which is kinder to a GIF.
Writing a crawl that reads like one
Every film keeps to the same shape: three paragraphs, around 80 words, present tense. The first sets the scene, the second names the threat, and the third follows one character into the opening shot and trails off on four dots. A New Hope's runs 83 words. Keep sentences short, because each line holds about five words and a long clause is hard to follow while it's sliding away from you.
One or two names go in capitals, the way DEATH STAR does. The title is always capitals and is stretched to the width of the column here, as it is on screen. For a birthday, a wedding or a presentation, put the occasion in the title and the person in the first sentence.
What you can save
The video is recorded in your browser at 1280 by 720 while the intro plays through once, so a 60 second crawl takes 60 seconds to save. It comes out as MP4 where the browser can write one (Safari and recent Chrome) and WebM otherwise. It has no sound, so the music is yours to add in an editor.
The GIF is 480 pixels wide at ten frames a second, about 5MB for a crawl of this length at film pace and half that at 2×. The PNG is a 1920 by 1080 still of whatever moment the slider is on. Copy link puts your text in the address, so whoever opens it sees your crawl and can play it.
For the logo lettering on its own, in any colour, there's the Star Wars font generator.