Components of a video intro for the theatre against a coloured curtain require a greyscale palette as the colours will not look true otherwise.
Also, one should have some music or voice over.
To find appropriate images, one can use the search terms etching, engraving, grayscale, clipart...
One can convert raster images to greyscale using GIMP (free and open source software) or vector image manipulation using Inkscape or manually editing .svg files using an editor
For text, it is best to have an outline around the text be it a white outline for black text or a black outline for white text.
If using Synfig Studio for animation, there is no outlined text option. One must either create a image with text in GIMP which also does not have an outlined text option or use Inkscape to create vectors from the text option and save this into a .sif file
Please choose a resolution for the video (List example common rations TO DO) and this will be used for the canvas size in GIMP or Inkscape.
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Get the text in (Either manually type it in or import it via a text file or a CSV file or some other format, that you can import a python library and use python-fu.
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Right Click over the text layer and expand to Image (You need to do this otherwise you have weird cutoff outlined text with straight edges
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Duplicate the layer.
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Selection to Alpha (or something like that) by right clicking over layer
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Either Border or Expand by a number of pixels
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Fill the selection with either a white or black outline depending on the colour of the text.
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Either export the file as .ora file (which is a compressed file with individual pngs) OR use an extension that exports each layer to an image (will add details)
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Drag the files from file explorer onto the stage or layers (I need to check this)
- Create text and add outline
- Convert text to a path
- Export to .sif format using Inkscape
- One option is to do a cross fade between images (Obviously please resize these to fit the stage before doing animation
- Choose some other transition maybe fade to black or white and then fade into another images. Move the images right, left?
Zoom in or zoom out into the images
There are two components to the video The image transitions and the text transistions. It is best to create this components in separate .sifz files and then link/import the file into one. This is because you may choose to not have the text transitions to be a fraction or multiple enclosed in 1 image transition and your animation files will get cluttered with key frames and it will be less easy to see the pattern of transitions
Plan the location of transitions. It is best to do this calculated on the length of audio and how long you want the transition for the text and image to be.
You can print out a number line from here (not ideal) or use Excel or LibreOffice Calc to do calculations using formulas with cells. If ncecessary you may need to find more images or shorten transsitions or lengthen or edit audio. You can edit audio with Audacity
A .sifz file is compressed (gzip? from membory) and consists of a XML file. This means it can be edited using a XML libray in a programming language such as Python. eg the inbuilt Python XML library or something like beautiful soup or python bindings with LXML a C library
There are other programs then Synfig Studio to do animation such as paid products eg Adobe Animation... or see these links for more options, possibly there are easy to use online templates already... or video editor solutions.
This gist is a work in progress. There are probably many methods to do this. This is what I have used and what I have learnt from using these set of tools. This may not be the quickest solution... Feel free to create your own gists on github... If you have any advice with using the tools above you can leave a comment, otherwise, please create your own gist online somewhere else is appropriate.