We use Kdenlive and GIMP to create a title: we transform a frame into a drawing, color it, and insert the text. We will also add transitions to animate the title entering the scene.
A film must be recognized immediately, to enter the imagination of its audience: if a film remains anonymous, the people who watch it will forget it after a few minutes. And for online videos, like the ones we publish on YouTube, it is even more true: on the internet the “competition” is so wide that if you do not recognize yourself, you risk being never able to get noticed compared to all the other authors of video clips. Each video can leave its mark in many ways: an epic scene, a good combination of images and soundtrack, unpredictable editing choices. And a title. Each movie has a title, and sooner or later you have to make it appear in the video. And the way the title appears makes a lot of sense about the style we want to impress on the movie. There are different types of titles that can be made, even in the films we see in the cinema we go from extremely elaborate titles and titles that seem written with the marker on a sheet of paper placed in front of the camera. For many videos, the solution is simple: you write a text, even with the Kdenlive Titles editor. Two lines of text, two or three colors, a monochromatic background. Of course, if you want to make a “headline” title like that of Austin Powers it is, in the end, a real film within the film. A good middle ground, which requires little time for the realization but still offers a good result, is that of the good, the bad, the ugly, Sergio Leone’s masterpiece: to combine the texts of the drawings. The title is not simply imprinted on the frame, but an attempt is made to transform the movie into a drawing. And, of course, you can also animate the lyrics. This is precisely the idea we want to present: a simple but captivating title, and we will realize it obviously starting from a clip shot with the video camera. This clip will have to be stopped at some point for the title to appear, and then we can start it again from the same point. The moment the action stops we take the frame and begin to modify it with GIMP, the most powerful photo editing program in the free and open source world. This program will be used to transform the frame into a two shades of brightness design. In a nutshell, we will get a black drawing on a white background. And we will do it automatically, using the Threshold tool, which takes care of translating a photograph into an image with only two colors depending on the threshold we set. Obviously, since the images we shoot with the video camera do not have a very high contrast (otherwise the colors are unwatchable), we will need to repeat the threshold operation several times, but we can then easily combine all the various designs by overlapping them as we prefer. Once the desired result has been obtained, it will be possible to color this two-colored design with a color gradient, to make it obviously more pleasant. At this point we can add the text, better if dividing it on several levels. By exporting the various levels separately, in fact, we can then control their position with Kdenlive, making the background appear with a fading and making the various portions of text enter the scene with an animation, to prevent the text from appearing too still. As always, you can see the example video at the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZg4BXD32uM
The characters for the text
Obviously, when preparing a title, one of the key factors to consider is the font, that is, the character you want to use for the title. In general, it is better to focus on a legible font, something not too complicated. For example, the classics Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, and Verdana. In the field of free and open source software one of the most pleasant fonts is Ubuntu, and there is also Oxygen. But you can also focus on more elaborate characters, just find something suitable for the theme of our movie. A good library containing many free fonts is https://fontlibrary.org/ . S On the site you can see a preview of the various characters: there are some that simulate handwriting in italics, others that recall the screens of the signboards, and practically for all tastes.
When does the title appear?
We choose the frame in which the title will appear


Produce a silhouette
We transform the image into black and white, like a drawing




From the background to the title
We complete the background with a gradient and add the text




Let’s give some movement
We use Kdenlive to animate the appearance of the various elements of the title



