Web Development: How to Make Spooky Halloween Titles in Premiere Pro (With a Template)

Monday, October 12, 2020

How to Make Spooky Halloween Titles in Premiere Pro (With a Template)

The opening sequence of your Halloween film is your first chance to ignite your viewers' attention and have them dying for more. If you're going for maximum style and scares this Halloween, then try creating an awesome opener by getting started with a professionally designed template for Premiere Pro.

We'll run through a quick example to help you get started, but first, here are a few of our top tips to bear in mind when you're creating your title sequence.

Make sure fonts are easy to read. Even if you're going for something more fun, like spooky Halloween fonts, your audience should still be able to read your text easily.
Don't make it too long. Attention spans are short and many filmmakers recommend a sequence of less than 10 seconds.
Have fun and be creative. Even if your film is serious you can take a little more creative license with your title sequence.

How to Make Spooky Halloween Titles in Premiere Pro (With a Template)

Today we're using Taku / Dark Atmospheric Intro for Premiere from Envato Elements, which is easy to edit and comes with an included audio track, but there are plenty more Halloween Premiere Pro templates to choose from. Here's what we'll make:

Open The Project File

Either right-click on the project file and open with Premiere, or just drag the file into your timeline.

When it's opened here's how it looks.

You can see the various elements of the project are broken down logically into folders, each of which have their own options, so for example Text, Music, Colour and so on. You can also see the full template in your Timeline and play it through if you want to see how it looks without customisation.

Footage

In the Project Menu, under Assets you'll find the various resources that help make up the template effects, things like paint swatches and paper textures. They're all JPEGs so you can change them out for your own textures if you prefer.

Edit Text

As this is a titles template, and it's for Premiere Pro rather than After Effects, there's a lot of emphasis on the text. When you open the project, if you don't have the font it was created with installed, it'll make a substitute. Often it'll pick something just as good (for us it chose Against) but you can pick your own font if you like, and if you don't have anything spooky enough, take a peek at Envato Elements for inspiration.

Open the text folder and you'll see various placeholders. You can double-click on any placeholder and it'll open in your timeline and also in your main playback window.

Click on the text icon and then on your playback window and you'll be able to directly edit the text.

It's worth noting that some of the text placeholders make up the background effects, they're blurred placeholders generated text as standard. You can change them to something more appropriate, leave them as they are (who doesn't love generated Latin...), or delete them. Just be aware that if you do remove them, you'll be left with a plain background in places.