17,200 intros later: what people get wrong is the text

I have been making these since 2010 and the pattern in what people ask for has barely changed in sixteen years. Someone writes in already knowing which opening they want. It might be the Universal globe, the Netflix N or the Marvel Studios fanfare. By the time I hear from them that decision is finished, and it is nearly always the right one.

Then the text arrives, and the text is where it goes wrong. I would say every single time, which is an exaggeration, though a smaller one than you might think.

When someone asks what people get wrong when they order a custom intro, my answer is the wording. They pick the right style and then send too much text for it. A company name, a slogan and a date go into an opening built to hold a name and perhaps one short line.

Nobody needs help choosing

Most advice about intros starts with how to pick a style. I think that advice is written for a customer I almost never meet. People have usually seen the opening they want many times over, in a cinema or on their own sofa, long before they go looking for someone to remake it with their name in it.

Media server owners are the clearest case. They are the largest group I make these for and they almost never order just one. They turn up with a list.

The most ordered style in the Priyansh Animations intro library is the Universal 100th anniversary logo. I doubt anyone was steered towards it. It is one of the most recognisable openings there is, and people arrive wanting the thing they recognise. So the choice of style is the one part of an order I rarely have to think about.

The order form already knows

The order forms on the site have a character counter on each text field.

• Marvel Studios gives you two lines of 10 characters each
• Universal 100th Anniversary gives 12 for the title, 20 for an optional subtitle and 45 for an optional tagline
• Netflix gives 12 for the title and takes letters, numbers and spaces only
• Disney gives 20 for the title and 25 for an optional subtitle
• Breaking Bad gives two lines of 16 and 20

Now put those numbers next to the words the originals were designed around. "Universal" is nine letters and the form gives you 12. "Netflix" is seven and the form gives you 12. "Marvel" and "Studios" are six and seven, and each line gets 10. "Walt Disney Pictures" is 20 characters with its spaces, which is the Disney title limit exactly. Breaking Bad is the generous one, with 16 and 20 for a title of eight letters and three.

The limits follow the originals closely, and I think that explains most of what goes wrong. Each of these openings was composed around one short word or two, with the picture built to frame that much lettering. A title the same length as the word it replaces sits where the original sat. Add ten characters and the lettering has to shrink to fit the same space, and a title that has shrunk no longer looks like the opening the person fell for.

Twelve characters is less than it sounds. "Smith Family" is exactly 12. "The Hendersons" is 14 and already over.

Marvel Studios is the hardest style I make. It also has the tightest counter of the five, which seems about right to me.

A company name with its legal suffix, a slogan, the year it was founded and a line about who it is for. I understand why. Every one of those words means something to the person sending it, and cutting one feels like cutting part of the project. But the name is on screen for a few seconds while the picture moves and the music builds, and nobody watching can read a sentence in that time, though they can read a name.

Capitals

People type the title in all caps because that is how a film title looks in their head. For block lettering like Netflix or Marvel Studios they are right, since capitals are what those styles are made of. In the Disney script it looks wrong, and it looks wrong in a fair number of the other ident fonts as well.

The reason is in how script type is drawn. The MyFonts manual on script typefaces says it flatly: "Never set all-cap copy in a script typeface." Script capitals are designed to sit against a lowercase letter, and a row of them side by side tangles. Ilene Strizver makes the same point in her CreativePro column on scripts, where she warns that all caps can make most scripts unreadable.

Send the title the way you would write it on an envelope, with capitals where they belong.

Hebrew and Arabic

These are hard, and I would sooner say so than pretend every style handles them. Right-to-left scripts break most of what an English-language title is built on, and the direction of the letters is only the start. The W3C's explanation of bidirectional text points out that numbers inside right-to-left text still run left to right, and that a comma or an exclamation mark can end up on the wrong side of the line. Also software like After Effects that we use, do not handle it well.

So a Hebrew surname followed by a year has two directions in it, and a line that looks right in your email can come out in a different order somewhere else. Tell me the script before anything else and send the line exactly as it should read, including where the number goes.

The brief I would like to get

It is four lines long.

1. The style. You already know this one.
2. The exact title, in the capitalisation you want on screen.
3. A second line only if the style has room for it, marked as optional if you could live without it.
4. The language, if the text is in anything other than a left-to-right script.

Everything else can go in the message around it. I do want to know that the intro is for a seventieth birthday or the first film night on a new server, because it helps me read the title the way you mean it. That kind of detail belongs in the note and stays out of the title.

A custom video intro made by hand has a person at the other end of the form, which is the reason a short and exact brief is worth the two minutes it takes. I can ask about a spelling. I cannot guess which two lines of a forty-word message you would have kept.

If you are about to order, count the characters in your name first. If it comes out above 12, shorten it yourself before you send it, because you will choose a better short version of your own name than I will.