I'm wondering if anybody could provide text examples of their opening/closing credits. I'm working on a short film, just curious as to the order, layout (e.g. character or person's name first?), etc...

Feel free to e-mail me a text file to phillip_roh@yahoo.ca
Thanks!

"Hollywood" and the various movie unions have STRICT, STRICT, STRICT standards for who gets listed and how high the position lists in the credits. This is often part of their formal collective bargaining agreements.

But unless you're working under this kind of a union agreement, it's whatever the producer of the work wants to do.

I just finished a big budget corporate video for a pet supplies company and the only names in the credits were the ANIMALS who appeared in the video.

The 12 human actors, plus ALL the crew and production staff got narry a credit mention.

(Kinda nice, IMO, because the animals tend to worry a whole lot less about who gets "top billing!")

hey bill, thanks for the info!
This is just a simple short film (~25 mins), nothing fancy.
Me and the producer have a vague idea of who to include in the opening credits, and who to include in the closing credits, but we don't know what a 'normal' ordering would be.

This would be the general sorta rule. Kinda...

Typically whoever's responsible for the success/failure of the effort gets listed first, Producer/director/sponsors, etc.

Then everyone else gets separated into cast and crew groups

List cast first, top to bottom, by the size of their parts.

Then list the crew.

Provided people are getting paid, list them in roughly the order of their salary/fee - largest to smallest.

If folks aren't getting paid, list them in the order of the magnitude of the responsibility/effort they expend on the project.

If your sound person was there for 10 straight days of shooting, but 3 folks shared the lighting duties and came for 3 or 4 days each, I'd credit the soundie first. Essentially, list by how much work they put in.

There's no hard or fast rule about any of this, it's just how I'd approach it.

Oh, and count on the fact that as soon as you burn all the DVD's you'll realize you left out someone important - like the "volunteer" who put in 60 hours doing the DVD menu design. And you'll feel like a jerk for doing so. It's kinda like the "Murphy's Law" of credits.

Good luck.

Oh, and there's nothing to say you "have" to have opening and closing credits.

That happens in movies, again, because of contractual obligations and/or the promotional value of putting stars names up front.

Personally, I think "up front" credits are distracting. You're telling a story. Get to it! Putting your audience through minutes of opening credits wastes their time.

For most videos people are giving you a GIFT of their time to watch what you've done. Respect that. For my money you've got about a minute to hook your audience and suck them into what you're saying. So my suggestion is to get something VERY intersting up on the screen fast - and that's typically NOT large blocks of type.

My 2 cents anyway.

John Carpenter uses white titles on a black car in his films

John Carpenter uses white titles on a black car in his films

Is that car or card? :)