I'd like to ask a question of our panel of experts on these titles.
Of course now things are all done on computer, but back then-- how were those title screens made? Hand drawn in pen and ink and photographed and then reversed in process to only get the letters in white. Some of them are quite amazing and I don't understand how they were done.
I'm no expert - but as far as I know this pretty much covers it:
In the early days of cinema static credits were literally drawn on cards (hence the name "title cards") and filmed. The optical printer (see here (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_printer)) was invented in the 20s and enabled printing static or animated titles over moving images. These techniques were developed through the years so that by the 50s title cards were pretty much obsolete. Right up until the 80s titles were predominantly created using either the optical printer (to combine static or animated titles to live action sequences) or just using animation on it's own. By the late 90s computers started to be used predominantly for titles.
I've based this purely on my observations of film titles over the years - hopefully it is fairly accurate.....
:)
